DJT in a Coonskin Cap

Rembrandt's painting of the Prodigal Son

It happened again… Since the time he first ran for election, I periodically have had dreams about our president, Donald, that do not mesh at all with my waking opinions and observations about who he is and what he does. Let's just say my opinions are not approving ones and leave it at that.

Last night on the dream-stage of my brain, I was one of his closest trusted assistants and we had a friendly relationship. I followed him around with a notebook and paid attention in meetings for him so he could doze off. Meetings to which he wore a full deerskin Daniel Boone outfit complete with coonskin cap (thank you, dream costume department, I'm not sure what to think about that). We had a poignant conversation in which he confessed that he was very worried about what would happen to him when he died. I asked him if he had ever heard the story Jesus told of the prodigal son and he said no, he had not, so I began. 

There once was a loving wealthy father who had two sons. The younger son demands his half of his inheritance before his father is even dead, takes off for another country and squanders the money in wild living until it runs out. Then there is a famine in the country and the only job he can find is tending pigs. He is so hungry that he wishes he could eat the pig's food. At that moment, he “comes to his senses” and thinks of his father, a good man, who might hire him as a servant if he gets on his knees and begs for forgiveness, and then at least he would have food and shelter.

While the son is walking down the road towards home and still a long way off, his father sees him and recognizes him in the distance. He goes running to meet him and throws his arms around him, and while the son is trying to stammer out a speech he has prepared about how he has messed up and is not worthy to be called a son anymore, the father is hysterical with delight and is yelling for his servants to come bring clothes for his son and start planning a giant party for his homecoming. "This son of mine was dead, and now he is alive! He was lost, and now he is found!" (the story goes on very interestingly and I recommend you read it yourself, but this is as much as I told our president in dream-land).

As I told this story, Donald began to sit up and a it seemed a great weight lifted off of his shoulders. Something changed in his face, an expression of daring hope that I have never seen before in real life in any pictures or videos of him.

As usual after one of these dreams, I woke up thinking, incredulously, that pigs are more likely to fly first than to see DJT have an authentic, all-encompassing change of heart. It is very, very hard for me to imagine such a thing becoming reality. But once again, I choose to interpret such a dream as a reminder to pray for this person who I do not like at all in real life. He has committed unspeakable atrocities against vulnerable people... but Jesus seems to tell us that even a Donald can come to his senses, by the grace of God. And when and if he does, he will learn that he is loved unconditionally, not based on any achievements or victories or peace treaties. Nor is it love nullified by his history of cruelties and injustices. He will become a person who can look at his life clearly, grieve at what he has wasted, and understand how he has broken his Father’s heart over and over again with how he has treated those he was supposed to love, serve, protect and lift up. True repentance will make him become a willing and glad participant with the Father in restoring all that he has abused and broken. This is the truth for any of us, no matter who we are or the level of our crimes against God and humanity.

Our Father,

who is in heaven,

holy is your name!

Let your kingdom come,

and your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven:

so that your child Donald may come to his senses, run toward you, and be transformed as only you can transform. Let his heart discover what it means to be truly and unconditionally loved, that your love might begin to pour out as a new refreshing spring from his dry and dusty heart. Let he who is dead come alive, and he who is lost be found. Amen.

Getting through Christmas 2025

A friend I told today how much I was struggling told me to get writing, so here I am.

I have never been a person without two living parents before. I had no idea what this was going to be like except that it would be hard. And I purposefully didn't spend much time dwelling on it these past few years since I have long learned that pre-preparing mentally for imagined hard things in the future is not worth the effort. I can't ever get right what it is *really* going to be like so practicing for it mentally is an exercise in fruitless anxiety. 

Boy, is it hard. Wicked hard. And getting harder every day, not easier. I didn't expect that. 

A long time ago, a few of my family members and I decided to go climb Mt Washington up in New Hampshire. We hadn't been training for it, it didn't sound too hard, we were young and strong. Why not? We'd go up and camp at the foot the night before, start early in the morning, and climb up and down in one day and drive back home that night. 

That day was one of the hardest feats of physical exertion I've ever done. The last stretch was the worst, just mentally steeling myself to put one foot down in front of the other. But, we eventually got to the top. We did it. We rested a bit as the fog blew in and out, I don't think we got to see any views. And then it was time to go down. 

Going down was so much worse. 

Legs that had already given their all going up were not prepared for a long, steep descent. Knees like jelly, growing more and more painful and wobbly all the way down. We finally made it down but then we had to take turns driving home, everyone else in the car dead asleep, driver trying so hard to stay awake. I was in pain for weeks afterwards. I remember having to go up and down stairs sideways one step at a time because it hurt too much to lift legs up and down the normal way.

I am not sad I gave it my all, caring for my parents. I have no regrets. Love made it possible. I loved them SO much and my sisters felt the same. We wished we could have given them more and more and more, but we only gave what was humanly possible to give. I don't think we could have given more no matter how much we tried. So while I live with the sad reality that there was so much pain and suffering, these last five years especially- I'm not beating myself up with regrets about what we couldn't do. I am blessed to have had parents like them, not mean or abusive or addicted to substances. I can only say that as hard as it was, they made it far easier for us to care for them than the parents many of you out there have to deal with. Because there was always love, and grace even at the hardest times. The neurological decline they had miraculously did not steal that away from us like it easily could have. I am so, so sorry for those of you that do not or did not have that. Bless you.

So here I am, collapsed at the top of Mt Washington, or perhaps I am already descending the steep rocky trail, but I am so, so tired. My body and brain keep doing things I don't expect and my executive functioning that worked so hard to keep it together to be able to make sound medical decisions for my dad has gone Ker-Plunk and sunk to the bottom of a deep pool somewhere. Is it Christmas Eve? Why yes, it is. We went to church this evening and I could only barely manage to be there. I took refuge in a dark room at the back and traced a complicated goose on my iPad while I listened to the service and calmed myself down. I came out for the Lord's Supper and candles and Silent Night.  We went home and I disappeared and wrapped presents and tried to watch a nice tame nature documentary but nope, they just had to turn it into an intense drama between hungry mama wolves and mama sea otters trying to protect their babies complete with fraught music portending doom. I can't take that. Turns out I couldn't even take Jack Black as the Polka King either because I can't handle good old Polka-loving folks getting defrauded in a Ponzi scheme. It's like when I had a concussion- anything even slightly "too much" is like sandpaper on my poor raw brain. Everything is just too much.

I wish you all a blessed Christmas. Merry? Ha. Not likely around here at the moment, but the One who started Christmas is here with me even when I'm not feeling merry at all, so it's all good. Bless you, friends, I love you all.

It's Ungrokkable

Six-year-old me standing in a field

Two weeks. That's how long it's been since my dad hasn't been here where I can touch and see him and kiss his whiskered cheek and I don't like it AT ALL.

As my dad would say- I just can't "grok it." How is this even possible? It is forcing my brain to grapple with the deeply un-understandable and mysterious. I believe by faith that he has followed my mother into a different world, a different kingdom, a different everything- and that he still exists. In fact, him dying drives that faith home even deeper and harder, because I saw it. I saw him there, and then not there. I think anyone who has sat in the presence of a soul leaving the body knows exactly what I am speaking of, and if you are still a die-hard materialist after witnessing that, I fully admit I have no idea what it is like to be you (but it's okay, I'll still love you). One moment there is a complete human, and then next moment there is a deflated tent where the poles have collapsed and no one is in it. There is no doubt. That person is gone, and it is every bit as shocking as Bilbo Baggins putting on The Ring at his eleventy-first birthday party and disappearing into thin air. The movies are wrong. Nobody looks like they are sleeping when they are dead. My dad went from sleeping in his body to not in it at all in a split second and the transformation was unmistakable.

When my sister brought my mother's ashes over to the care home where my dad was staying, she carried them in the beautiful rosewood box inside a paper shopping bag, in case he expressed a desire to see it, but hidden so he wouldn't see if he didn't want to. She opened the door and my mom's friend and fellow dementia-sufferer, Linda, was sitting in her wheelchair at the kitchen table. What a gift Linda was- her sweet smile, beautiful eyes shining with love, happy to sit next to my mom and hold her hand for many months. When my sister walked in Linda looked up in surprise and said "How did you do that? How did you bring her back here?" Clearly she saw my mom. What was going on? My brain can't "grok" that either. It makes my head feel cloudy. The brain wants to understand and put things into neat understandable categories. But to even try here is an exercise in nonsense and I think that is why if you decided to explain it away to me in either scientific or spiritual terms I would instinctively like to punch you in the nose (metaphorically, but emphatically).

Perhaps this is why in the last few days I have not much wanted to do anything in the online world. I have wanted to hold real books, read Psalms from a real Bible, smell leaf-mold, feel my dog's silky black fur and listen to the funny snorts he makes at all times due to a deviated septum. I want real things that anchor me into place where I am in this world within this body I am existing in right now. Crackly leaves, smooth wood, cacophony of bird song. Hugging arms, love, embrace. I need security and tangibility in the midst of such un-grok-ability. 

I was born, I grew, I became a teenager, I became an adult, but none of those things felt like this, like Noah's flood scouring and completely remaking the world, rocking the foundations and transforming mountains and valleys. Dazed animals and people wandering out of an ark on a mountaintop to something totally unfamiliar. A scoured, devastated landscape, wiped clean, where they are expected to make a new life. Culture after culture around the world tells this story, this flood, this re-making, upending-- the survivors trying, impossibly, to grok it. 

My bedrock just subducted under another continental plate, the ones who brought me into this world have gone out of it, and I cannot recognize this new landscape I see in front of me. I think there will be good things there, and I have my own compassionate Shepherd to lead me. I feel him. I know perhaps more than ever the reality of his presence and love with me. But he is with me AND I am still me, here, totally bewildered, crying a lot, exhausted, washed up on a beach in a storm, and also soothed listening to the waves and thankful for warm, dry sand to rest on.

Cream of Potato & Greens Soup with lemon, bacon, chives and crispy shallots

 

This picture has no glamour lighting and it is just my freshly served-up bowl on my dining room table, but trust me, this something you cannot stop eating. Just one more spoonful please! If you do not have the privilege of a fridge full of splendid vegetables from In Good Heart Farm, I am sorry. Join the next CSA season. Move to central North Carolina if you must. This features everything good we are offering at the moment and it is Alpha-gal safe for those of you who have joined our elite community and know what that is. No mammal ingredients!

Sauté the following over medium heat in however much olive oil you think is needed. Just add the ingredients as you chop them, stirring as you go.

1 yellow onion, chopped

3-4 cloves garlic, chopped

1 teaspoon garlic powder

2 teaspoons Dilly Mix made by Patricia at In Good Heart Farm* 

5 potatoes, diced (wash but don't peel, leave those nutritious skins on)

3 Hakurei turnips, diced 

1/2 bunch of collard greens, stems removed, leaves chopped

A few handfuls of fresh nettle leaves (about an ounce)

Add:

6 cups chicken broth

Let this all simmer until the potatoes are tender. Remove from heat and puree well in a blender till creamy. Return to pot on low heat.

Then add:

Juice of 1 lemon

1/4 cup nutritional yeast

salt and pepper to taste

A splash of vegan whipping cream if you have it

Serve with:

Chopped turkey bacon you have been crisping up in the oven at 350

Lots of finely chopped chives

Crispy fried shallots (latest favorite thing from Trader Joes)

*ingredients are dried green garlic, onion, dill, celery and Maldon finishing salt

Refugees wanted for hammock occupancy and squirrel observation

A September milkweed pod bursts open

It's strangely and wonderfully cool for a sunny day in early September in central North Carolina at 540 feet above sea level. The light is changing to a slightly more golden-green hue in the forest room where my little house is built. The tall tulip poplars are the earliest to leaf out in the spring and the first to change their colors and drop their leaves in the fall. It's not fall yet but the cat-faced golden and brown leaves are raining down with every fresh and clean gust of wind. Bright sun shining through waving leaves makes dancing patterns on the ground. Birds are chatting to each other or maybe they are trying to subtly communicate to me that I should fill up the bird feeders which have been empty all summer. Last evening I watched a flock of Canada geese fly overhead and heard their wild calls- most likely they are local residents that were returning to the lake nearby for the night, but that sound is the sound of my childhood, great flocks upon flocks passing over our house in New Jersey in the early autumn night, descending to the river across the street for rest. 

There is something about this season, the change of summer into fall, that has always grabbed hold of me and tells me to keep my eyes open. This is the time when beautiful orb weavers have grown large and, taking a cue from the gorgeous patterns on their backs the Creator has played with over the aeons, spin exquisite webs that stretch tree to tree and sparkle on misty mornings or (plaster themselves to unwary human faces on a walk in the woods). Tiny caterpillars have grown into long fat ones, looking for a place to pupate until the spring. The river oats are turning to gold, the goldenrods and asters are forming their flower buds for the royal parade of yellows and purples soon to begin. Milkweed pods are heavy on the plants, leaves tattered and full of chomping-holes; hopefully chomped by monarch caterpillars. This year's fawns are still dappled with white and doing zoomies through the back of our property while their moms patiently graze, but they are much larger than they were when they emerged shaikly in the spring, sticking close their mothers or curling up into tight, silky brown and white balls in the grass and leaves at the edge of the forest. 

Life in the outer world has its unending horrors, but I am thankful for this stability of change, the same changes occurring over and over again, somehow more beautifully every time I see them unfold. Living here under the trees in the great Eastern Deciduous Forest, under the poplars, oaks, hickories, sweet gums, dogwoods and pines, where cicadas and katydids, crickets and frogs, chickadees and wrens and hawks, woodpeckers and owls provide the soundtrack day and night... this is a refuge from our strange world where violence and cruelty and accumulation of manmade things are exalted. Why would you want power and plastic thingamabobs when you could have all the beauty of the natural world infusing your sight and sound and smell every day? I don't understand it. And I wish I could gather all those trapped unwillingly out there in the smoke and ruins into my forest refuge where things are still beautiful and the air is breathable and there is no sound of war or loud voices making demands and proceeding to ruin your life. I want to gather up the refugees and the traumatized and put them in my hammocks under the canopy of trees to rest and be restored by squirrels chasing each other around tree trunks while I cook for them and administer tea until they can function again.

Would that I could, and that I could give them back the beauty and nature of their own homes as they once were, so I could come and be their guest and drink tea under the fig tree and eat blini and chocolate in peaceful gardens where there are no bombs, just quiet, and the goodness of people who love.

----------

Kirstie Schraffenberger

goldfinchmeadow@gmail.com & kirstie.schraf@gmail.com

My New Glasses

2014 is the year I mark as the beginning of a different Kirstie, one of the most important years of my life. For those new to my writing: 2014 is the year I had a massive breakdown in body and mind and checked myself into a psychiatric hospital in a dreadful state of darkness and horror and terror and sleep deprivation. I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and OCD and given mind-saving meds and started off onto an intensive therapy program. It was the hardest year and the best year, a new beginning of a quality of life I didn't know was possible. While I was totally wrecked, the clarity I began into gain in my mind, free of the bullhorn of constant, disturbing intrusive thoughts (well, not totally free, but toned down to a much much quieter level) gave me hope. With an excellent therapist and finding a church that accepted my broken self without fear or disgust or judgement, I began to heal.

Eleven years. Eleven years of the Lord's gentle, patient, loving work in leading me out of the darkness of twisted messages both received from the outside and generated from the inside, grown into dominating monsters of living fearfully, terrified of doing things wrong, not doing enough, and imagining that I could have prevented bad things happening to myself and loved ones if I just had more faith or done more or stopped being so selfish and rescued more. I was wearing the glasses of fear.

Looking out through glasses of fear on the world is, obviously, just going to take you from one terror to the next. It's nearly impossible to read the Bible with these glasses on and not have a panic attack. You take everything as literally as possible, and somehow that feels like the safest path, but not really because it requires things like chopping your hands off and pulling your eyes out and selling all your possessions and not owning anything. Reading through fear means you are constantly condemned, over and over and over again. You lose the ability to perceive nuance and metaphor. Every sermon or well-meaning thing someone says is dissected under the microscope and leaves you worse off than ever.

Underneath it all, there was a persistent glimmer of refusal to believe all that fear was saying to me. I knew I was loved. I knew God would rescue me from this hell that I suspected was not what he wanted for me. That glimmer never left me even though it was tiny and faint and overwhelmed constantly by the intrusive visions in my brain that left me reeling and unable to sleep and heart pounding.

The past eleven years have not been easy in terms of things happening to my life and family. But how I receive these hard things into my life has changed dramatically because slowly but surely, my internal outlook on the world has changed from fear to love. 

I started writing this post this morning after writing this in my journal:

"The Lord always shepherds us toward greater freedom, peace, wholeness and rest, away from anxiety and fear and heavy loads that we drag along *because* of anxiety and fear. He accomplishes his work of healing us via love we can settle into and trust, instead of the fear that makes us sit up suddenly and race off with heart pounding to try to accomplish something for him that we think he wants so we can be safe, but that we hate doing and desperately wish we didn't have to do because deep down it doesn't feel good at all."

That excerpt is the distillation of how I function now inside. This truth is what helps me decide what I will take in to be part of myself and what I will reject. It is what helps me discern my own thoughts as trustworthy or trashcan-worthy. Not always. I am still certainly prone to the occasional embracing of fear-based thinking, but not for long. I begin to see it clearly what it is for what it is sooner. 

As you probably know, we here in the United States are in the middle of a cultural and political upheaval. The status quo has been turned upside down, to the rejoicing of some and the despair of others. As a nation we have made major shifts in deciding how we are going to respond to the hardness and despair in the world. We have determined to put on a new pair of glasses to chart the course ahead for our country. What sort of glasses those are could be described many ways depending on who is doing the describing. What is clear is that we are not all wearing the same glasses — what one side is seeing for us as a glowing golden future is being viewed as the burning darkness of hell by the other. 

There are many, many Jesuses on display at the store of America right now, and each one comes with its own pair of glasses and irrefutable instruction booklet supposedly lifted from the pages of Holy Scripture. The problem is, most of these Jesuses make me sick (especially the ones on display sold by some prominent political figures and organizations who shall not be named). They are so far removed from the Jesus I know, who attracted me to himself with his revelation of profound love filling up my soul to the brim and overflowing. A love that wants to make me whole, and more me, not less, by snipping off all the things that hold me back and restrict me and bind me in fear and anxiety. The Jesus I know is constantly taking weights off my back that I didn't even realize were there so I can leap higher for joy. The Jesus I know has given me a new pair of glasses: The glasses of love. It is these glasses that he has slowly been helping me to wear more these past eleven years more than the glasses of fear. 

Instead of being scared of people- because I might have to try to rescue them/convert them/change their minds- I see someone to love and come alongside. I want to know them, listen to them, see them, understand what makes them tick, enjoy them. I want to be a trustworthy friend that they can explore their thoughts and struggles with, without me jumping in awkwardly to make sure they know what I think God does and doesn't approve of (according to whatever my interpretation of the God of the Bible is). I want to trust that God has them in His sights and loves them profoundly and cares far more about them than I do, and hope that He uses me in some way to make his gentle, kind love more real to them. And the more I participate in this kind of relationship with others I find that they- whether they know it or not- are being used by God in *my* life. I am seeing God's love poured out on me and blessing me through people that would probably laugh at such an idea. But God speaks through them all the time! He is so kind to me, leading me to love people who turn out to have hearts secretly aligned with his ways. I find Jesus looking out all the time through the eyes of people who have supposedly rejected him and want nothing to do with him (I suspect perhaps because the most of the Jesuses they have been offered are the ones that all of us should heartily reject). 

I don't know where my winding rocky path through the wilderness of my faith will go next. Surely through more hard places, but also surely through astounding beauty and love that makes me sing, because my own dear Shepherd is the one leading me, giving me new eyes to see every day.

(Picture description at header: Silly picture of me and my black dog licking me, hand-drawn square glasses on my face with hearts on the lenses and lightening bolts coming out the sides of the frames.)

A Man Named Country

 I met a man named Country on the beach at sunset tonight

That’s what he calls himself

Maybe thirty years old

But ancient sorrow 

Was hewn into his ruddy freckled face

Giving him years and years he did not ask for

Eyes as blue as the sky

Overrun with tears

As he apologized -for nothing-

You can’t apologize for this

He said he was walking this beach 

To salute his buddies lying beneath the waves

Over there, out there, he pointed- 

A place where his heart  

Was lying blown to pieces with them.

17 of them, I think he said

Soldiers, his people,

The ones he served with day in day out

But they died,

And somehow, he lived. 

No one cares

That they give everything

They come back worth nothing,

Worth nothing, not even shit to anyone.

No one understands, no one knows what he’s seen.

I asked if I could hug him

And he said yes

I held him in the tightest hug I could

While he cried and shook

And apologized and apologized and apologized

I did not want to let him go

I wanted him to know that he is valuable, important 

Worth more than any of the stupid million things this stupid world thinks are something.

I looked at him and willed with my eyes for him to know

With all my heart crying out into the moment

I squeezed his hand and said things, I don’t even know what they were

I told him I would pray for him. I had nothing to give except wanting,

Wanting him to be well, wanting him to be loved,

Wanting him to be whole, healed

Able to leave his buddies trustingly in the hands of mercy

Mercy bigger than the ocean

Whose waves crashed around us in the sunset.

And then we parted-

Three, maybe four minutes of connection

In which I hope

The Love from the heart of all creation 

Came through me somehow

The only Love I know 

That can bring hearts back from the dead.

(This is a true story that happened tonight. Can we take care of our Vets, please?)