burdens – Page 2

The Dry Season

September 15, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

I write these words some dozen feet from the soft earth of the Virginia mountains, my feet dangling from the thick willow branch that also supports my butt and my back, because rain has been scant here of late. Everything that was bright and green at the turn of August has now gone a rusty brown. Leaves are falling brittle and dead. The deer and the bear are coming out of the woods to forage what they can. Those you meet in town shake their heads and shrug (“What you gonna do?”) and cock their heads up to a cloudless sky the color of the sea.

The dry season is here. And that’s why I’m here, in my willow tree.

It happens every year around this time, usually between the start of school and the beginning of harvest. There will be a few showers here and there, thunderstorms that blow over the mountain and dump inches of rain in minutes, the water unable to pierce the hard ground and so floods the streets and lowlands. Water, but the sort that nourishes little and helps nothing. The kind of water that only makes the weeds grow.

Though it’s a little more difficult to rummage around in the woods this time of year, I still do. You have to mind the snakes and grouchy critters, and you have to understand that going along quiet will be impossible with all the dry wood and hard leaves. But it’s still the woods, still the quiet wilderness and the open sky and the mountains all around you, and that’s where I went a little while ago and where I’ve always gone with things get a little rough.

Dry seasons don’t just happen in the world. They happen in us, too.

Have you ever noticed that? There are seasons right outside your door and there are seasons right inside you, and both can blow cold gales or steady rain or bright sun, and both can make you happy for life and make you dread it.

Whenever it’s dry both inside and out of my own days, I’ll take a walk along a path through the woods across the street and listen for the sound of the bold stream that winds and dips its way from the deep mountain to the South River, and I’ll come here. In all my years, I’ve never known this stream to dry. No matter how parched the summers get or how long the snow doesn’t fall, the water here always runs. I’ll weave my way between all these dying and thirsty trees and follow the near bank, ease myself over the moss and slippery rocks, to the spot where the stream bends toward town. To where my willow sits.

It is an ancient one, tall and thick of trunk, with a canopy that rises and falls with a gentle grace of perfect symmetry. My tree is a marvel; I’ve never seen another quite like it. I’ll stand in its shadow and feel the cool of the air beneath its branches, rub my fingers over the long, slender leaves. Let it all fill my sight. And then I’ll leave my hat in the soft earth and slither up the trunk, my hands groping more by memory than sight, for the upward path to the first sturdy branch. There, I’ll sit and look and listen.

It isn’t a magic tree, this willow. As a boy I thought such things possible, even plentiful, but no longer. Not usually, anyway. Besides, this tree isn’t set apart from the hundreds and thousands of others surrounding it. It’s just as subjected to the seasons as any other. My tree isn’t always so green and blossoming. It doesn’t always look wonderful. It’s still in the world and so has no choice but to suffer along with the rest of its forest kin, to feel the stifling heat and the frigid cold, to be tasked with the very goal that is tasked to every other living thing everywhere—to endure, and for as long as it can.

Yet I’ve come here often in my own dry seasons (and I imagine I will continue doing so in all of my dry seasons to come) because there truly is something different about this particular tree, and advantage it possesses that the other trees here do not. And I scamper up these branches and sit and watch and listen so I will greater appreciate that difference and better apply it to my own life. Because even though this tree is planted in the same earth at the same base of the same mountain as so many untold others, this tree has also been planted along a stream that never dries. Its roots have access to a constant source of water. Even in the heat. Even in the dry season.

I sometimes fall into the trap of believing the happiness to be had in this world comes like the rain. It falls from the sky into my waiting arms and I try to gather up all I can, knowing that it will never rain for long. But here, in my willow, I know different. I know better. Real happiness is the kind that doesn’t depend on anything external, whether its rain from the sky or a cool breeze to chase the heat. It is instead found inside. Down deep, where your roots are.

It’s a lesson I’m going to try and hang onto whenever I decide to climb back down and resume my living. One I’d very much like to take home from the woods. It’s a valuable lesson, and maybe the most valuable one of all, to know that your happiness or your sorrow won’t come from whatever happens to you, but from where you’re planted.

No less precious

August 13, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

It was a little over sixteen years ago when Ken Copeland’s wife woke up feeling a little queasy. It was a Sunday, he remembers. The big deal that day was the football game later that afternoon. Redskins and Cowboys.

Ken never saw that game, because his wife decided to take a pregnancy test later that morning. In the two years they’d been trying to conceive a child, she’d gone through dozens of those tests. All had produced nothing but a disappointing minus sign. On that day, however, a vertical line appeared and bisected that familiar horizontal one. It was a plus.

Ken and his wife celebrated that day with tears, fears, and a steak dinner at the Sizzlin’ in town. They told everyone (even the waitress, who discounted their steaks as congratulations). Everyone wanted to know if Ken wanted a boy or a girl. His answer was the usual one. Ken didn’t care, just so long as the baby was healthy.

Matthew Brent Copeland was born nine months later at the local hospital.

Fast forward sixteen years to the playground at the local elementary school. Father and son are at the swings, Ken pushing Matthew. It’s the younger Copeland’s favorite activity, one that somehow calms the storms that rage in his mind. Ken thinks it’s the back and forth motion that does it, that feeling of flight and peace. He takes Matthew there every evening.

There are smiles on both their faces, though that hasn’t always been the case. The Copelands went through a tough time when Matthew was diagnosed with autism at age four.

In quiet conversation, Ken will tell you that almost killed him. He’ll admit the anger he felt toward God and the despair over his son, whose life would now never be as full and as meaningful as it should have been.

And he’ll tell you that deep down in his dark places, if he and his wife would have known what would happen to Matthew, he would have preferred abortion over birth. There would be less pain that way. For everyone.

Yet now, twelve years later, he smiles.

I watch them from the privacy of a bench on the other side of the playground. See him push his grown son and yell “Woo!” as he does. I see the perfect and innocent smile on Matthew’s face as he’s launched out and up. Hear his own “Woo!” in reply.

When they’re done, Ken takes his son’s hand in his own and together they walk across the soccer field toward home. Their steps are light, they take their time. It’s as if their world has stopped for this moment between father and son to marvel at the bond between them, proof that the hardships life sometimes thrusts upon us don’t have to break our hearts. They can swell our hearts as well and leave more room for loving.

Ken has made his peace. Peace with God, with his life, with his son’s condition. It hasn’t always been easy, but nothing that is ever worth something is easy. There are still times when he looks at Matthew and wonders what his son’s life would be like if he were normal and healthy. He’s sixteen now, that age where a boy’s world should expand in a violent and glorious eruption of girls and cars and sports. But Matthew’s world will never expand. It will always remain as small as it was when he was four, and just as simple.

Ken says that’s okay. That it has to be. He’s learned that in a world that seems full of choices, there are really only two—we can hang on, or we can let go. Ken has let go. Of his anger and his disappointment, of his despair. And he’s found that what has replaced those things are peace and fulfillment and joy, things he’d always chased after but until Matthew came along never really found.

If Ken would change anything, it would be what he said to all those people who’d asked him if he wanted a boy or a girl. His one regret is what his answer always was, that it didn’t matter as long as the baby was healthy. Because an unhealthy baby is no less precious, no less valuable, and no less life-changing.

Where you belong

July 13, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

In January, 2010, satellite pictures of the Amazon rain forest revealed the presence of a hidden community living in three clearings in the Javari Valley, which lies near the Brazil/Peru border. Subsequent flight expeditions over the region confirmed about 200 people lived in the tiny village. Not a big deal, really. Despite notions to the contrary, the Amazon is home to many communities. What set this community apart, however, was that it had never been seen before. Scientists had stumbled upon a tribe of people unknown to the world.

I confess to a geeky side. News stories such as that one rock my world. Imagine that in an age of telescopes that can see into the farthest reaches of the universe and submarines that can reach the very depths of the ocean, there are still entire cultures that have somehow managed to remain hidden in the untrodden places of our fair planet. Cut off from civilization, blissfully ignorant of things like ISIS and presidential elections and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It’s a storyline straight out of Indiana Jones.

It’s enough to make me giddy.

It’s also enough to make me wonder what happiness they must enjoy. Imagine being able to live life unfettered by nasty things like time and career. You rise with the sun, venture into the jungle to either kill or dig up some breakfast, and eat it in a hammock surrounded by your family and friends. Repeat again for lunch and dinner. Maybe weave a basket or have a dance. Watch the kids play with critters and pets. Make sure the fire has plenty of wood. Go check the crops, then maybe visit your buddy who lives in the next hut to shoot the breeze and engage in a bit of gossip. Watch the sun go down. Go to bed. Do it all again the next day.

No taxes to pay or commutes to endure. No 401k to watch as it shrinks into oblivion. And who cares about gas prices when you’ve never even seen a car? No, the busy world you’ve never seen simply passes you by and leaves you alone. No muss, no fuss, just a hammock and the jungle around you.

I’ll be honest, I envy those people. They don’t know how good they have it.

Regardless of how much I long to chuck it all, fly to the Amazon, and apply for admission into the tribe, it won’t happen. The Brazilian government has a strict policy regarding uncontacted tribes. They are not to be bothered.

But just in case I would get that chance, I could see myself trekking down some forgotten jungle path and coming across the tribal chief, who would invite me to his hut for a little food and a lot of talk. And more than likely, he’d look at me and laugh.

“What are you doing here?” he’d ask. “What, you think WE have it good? Really? Tell you what, you try growing all your food in the jungle. Doesn’t always work, you know. And it’s not like you can just run down to the Food Lion for some chips and dip if the animals and the weather take your crops. Which happens, like, ALL the time.

“You can go hunting. Lots of animals in the jungle to eat. Of course, most of them will just as soon eat YOU. Try stepping on a snake or a spider or running across a panther. Tell me how that goes for you. And you better hope you don’t run into anyone from the tribe down the river, because they’ll just as soon kill you as let you pass.

“Can’t go to the hospital, either. We don’t have one here. We have a doctor of course, and he’s a real smart guy, but in the end the only thing he can do is pray to the gods and give you some plants to eat. Plants don’t cure everything, you know. And the gods…well, let’s just say they do their thing and we do ours. We don’t understand them, we just try to keep them happy.

“Sure, you can stay. You’ll probably live a few more years, most of us make it to 50 or so before we’re so worn out that we drop. That’s assuming you don’t get bitten or eaten or killed, though. Actually, why don’t you just run on back home where you belong.”

At which point I probably would.

And I would take with me this lesson: Life is tough. Doesn’t matter who you are or where you are. We’re all looking for something better, we’re all stressed, we’re all struggling for a little hope.

In a world that seems determined to point out our differences, those are similarities we will always share.

Shutting out the world, if only for awhile

June 22, 2015 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

blue ridge I write this in the early afternoon of this past Friday, looking out the window toward mountains shrouded in summer haze. It’s quiet here, always a blessing, even as the world burns slow in other parts of the country. Sad as it is, I suppose I can use “burns” both literally and figuratively.

Tomorrow morning, my family and I will pack up and trade these mountains for the Carolina coast. My job allows one vacation a year, and I mean to use every bit. It’s always a scramble to get away, part stress and part strain and an overwhelming need to escape, even if some part of you understands that you’ll eventually have to come back again. I can say I always look forward to vacation week. I can say I’m looking forward to this one a little more.

Because I’m tired, you see.

Of everything.

This week has brought news of another shooting, this one at a church in Charleston, claiming nine lives. Aside from the hurt and anger and outrage, I don’t have anything to say. Still trying to process it, I suppose. Still trying to take it all in and turn it over in my heart and my thoughts, still trying to figure out if I should do such a thing or even if such a thing is possible. I don’t know that it is. Some part of my says no, that if I could understand the whys of what would lead such a young man to perpetrate such an evil act, I should then worry much more about myself than about the state of the world. But another part of me begs a yes to that question, at least partway—it may not be possible to understand or healthy to ponder why, but an attempt at both is necessary. Too often, we are confronted by the reality of evil only to turn ourselves away. It scares us (as it should), makes us uncomfortable (as it should), but that’s not the worst that evil inspires. To gaze upon it is to see into a mirror badly bent. It is to behold what we are all capable of, should things come to it, and to know how far we have yet to go. It’s heartrending and soul crushing, and yet the alternative—blaming parents, blaming guns, blaming culture, or ignoring it all together—is much worse.

There was a time not long ago when these reminders would come sporadically, spread out over months or even years. But now they seem to come in a much quicker fashion, don’t they? Maybe it’s the news, now on twenty-four hours a day. Maybe it’s a byproduct of living in an age of constant social media, a heartrending and soul crushing thing in itself. I don’t know. All I do know is what I’ve said—I’m tired.

On my way to work this morning, I stopped at the town BP for gas. A tractor pulled up to the pump beside me, the farmer straddling it already dirty and sweating from the fields. Our talk wound itself around to Charleston. He shook his head, eyes wide and mournful. Said he hadn’t heard a thing about it.

I wondered how that was possible, then stared at that old John Deere. Here was a man with neither time nor inclination for the wider world. Long days outside at the farm, tending to cows and the rising corn, short nights curled in bed, the weather report better told by the winds and the clouds than by some man in a suit coming through a television screen. Of course he hadn’t heard. How would he?

I felt bad, thinking I’d ruined his morning with the news. The way he pulled off told me he took things hard. Church is supposed to be a place of love. Where you’re safe. He probably went home thinking that’s the last time he’s coming to town. Ain’t nothing good away from the farm. Whole world’s going to hell, already halfway there.

They say ignorance is bliss, and they mean that bad. I would agree. Shutting yourself off from the world, refusing to find out what’s going on and to care about it, is a lot of what’s behind the problems we face. But I still think about that old farmer on his tractor, tending to his work as the world flies past unseen and unknown. I think about long walks on an empty beach and tides that carry your troubles away. And I think maybe that’s what we all need right now, if only for a little while.

The poor folk

June 2, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I ask Larry if he’s still watching over the poor folk every time I see him, and every time he says yes. He says yes and then offers me one of those nods that are accompanied by pursed lips. You know, the kind of expression that means it’s tough to look but you have to anyway. Someone’s got to watch over them, Larry says, and it might as well be him. Especially since he was poor once.

He’ll tell me he still watches over them from the same place, right across the river from the big building where they like to gather. Not a pretty sight—Larry will tell me that too, and always—but one worth watching nonetheless, if only for the education the sight provides. “There but for the grace of God,” he’ll say, and then he’ll nod and purse his lips again.

He says there have been times in the past when he’s taken the bridge across the river and gone to see them. Or tried. The poor folk will sometimes entertain Larry’s presence for a while. He was after all one of them once, and the poor folk are mannerly on the outside even if they are lost inward. They’ll say hello and how-you-doing and come-on-in. Larry will hello them back and say he’s fine, just fine. But he never goes in the big building. He’s been in there too many times in his life, he’ll tell me, and he’s seen all there is to be seen. I guess that’s true enough, but sometimes I think Larry’s afraid he’ll catch the poor again, like it’s some sort of communicable disease spread by contact.

Better than driving across the bridge to say hello is to stay on the other side of the river and watch. That’s what he tells me. It’s sort of a warning, though it’s one I don’t need. To be honest, I don’t have much of a desire to be around the poor folk. I like it where I am, right here with Larry and the rich people. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll catch poor, too. Maybe deep down I think they’ll sneeze on me.

Larry says he has God to thank for being rich now, and when he says this he won’t nod and purse his lips. He’s much more apt to pat the rust spot on his old truck—a ’95 Ford from down at the local car lot, which was a steal at $5,000—or take off his greasy cap as a sign of respect for invoking the Almighty. Yesir, Larry will say, God stripped away all of his poor and made him rich. I guess that’s nothing new in a time when a lot of people think God’s sole purpose in the universe is to shower down hundred dollar bills on everyone who’s washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Sometimes I’ll ask him if the people who gather at the big building across the river are all poor. Surely there are a few rich ones mixed in. He’ll tell me yes, there are a few rich ones, but they’re rare. Once he said I’d just as soon go in the big building looking for a unicorn as I would a rich person. I laughed at that. I think it was the way he’d said it—“Yooney-corn.”

Still, curiosity kicked in. I had to find out for myself.

I drove up to the big building one town over, careful to park across the river as Larry suggested. Lines of cars filled the parking lot—from my vantage point, I saw seven Mercedes, half a dozen BMWs, and three Jaguars. I watched patrons adorned in fancy dresses and pressed suits go in for dinner, watched the golf and tennis players come out.

Larry’s poor folk.

He was once one of them (it was the Mercedes and the golf for Larry, the fancy dress for his wife, and the tennis for his kids). They were at the country club five days a week and sometimes six, depending on how busy they all were. He’ll say he swore he was rich. But then came the recession followed by the job loss, and suddenly the Mercedes was gone (replaced by the truck, a steal at five grand) and so was the country club.

That’s when God showed Larry that what he thought was riches was really poverty. That’s when Larry found that wealth is better measured in love and family and simple things.

Larry says he never knew how poor he was because all that money got in the way. Now he says he’s the richest man in the county.

I think he might be right.

The happy gas theory

May 11, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

It’s May, and that means both good and bad things around here. Good in that the school year is almost over for my kids. Bad in that it still quite isn’t. That’s why my son said something about the happy gas last night.

Here’s where he got that:

He was six when he got his tonsils out. It wasn’t the visit to the hospital that worried him. He was okay with the hospital. And it wasn’t even the pain. What worried him the most was the very thing he most looked forward to.

The happy gas.

It’s tough trying to explain a medical procedure to a six-year-old, especially when the ins and outs are pretty vague to his father. I didn’t really know what tonsils and adenoids were, what function they served, or why they were giving him such trouble. But the anesthesia part I knew.

So I told him he got to wear a mask like Batman did and that the air would smell like cotton candy and he’d fall asleep. And while he was asleep the doctors would do their business and make him better.

“You won’t feel a thing,” I told him. “Promise.”

He didn’t believe me.

Experience had taught him otherwise. He’d slept before, and he’d either done things or had things happen that he not only remembered, but felt.

He fell out of the bed twice. Felt that. Bopped his face against the headboard. Felt that, too. He’s also awakened himself by burping, talking, snoring, and coughing. Sometimes all at once.

No way, he thought, no way, would he be able to sleep through someone operating on him.

So I explained that the happy gas wouldn’t just put him asleep, it would put him really asleep, and that the doctor would make sure he stayed that way until everything was finished.

Afterward, once we were home and he was safely on the sofa with his ice cream, I asked him about it.

“I didn’t feel anything,” he said. “I can’t even remember anything.”

And then he said this—“I wish I could have some of that for when I go to school. That way I could just wake up when I got home and I wouldn’t remember any of it.”

Funny, yes. And that definitely pegged him as my son. But he really had a great idea there, at least on the surface. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have some advance warning to the less than perfect things we have to face? And wouldn’t it be great if just before we could put on a Batman mask, breathe some cotton-candy air, and fall asleep through the whole thing?

Yes. It would.

I’ll admit for a while I did my best not to try and poke holes in his Happy Gas Theory. I knew there were some and most likely many. But sometimes we take comfort in those things that aren’t and can never be. That’s what I did while sitting on the sofa with him. I reveled.

But the truth of course was that we had to go through our painful things sometimes. We could slide around some and jump over others, but sooner or later a storm would come that we couldn’t outrun or take cover from, and we were left to stand there in the open under the pour.

Sometimes, that didn’t seem right to me.

It would make more sense to say that if God was there and if God was good, He would take better care of the ones who loved Him. He would make sure our paths were clear. He would prevent the pain and the pour and the doubt. He would take away the fear.

If there was such a thing as everyday happy gas, I thought, then shouldn’t it be God?

Maybe. But maybe that pain and pour and doubt served a purpose that outweighed the need for our happiness. Maybe we needed fear so we could know the value of faith.

Maybe.

I didn’t know for sure, but I thought the odds were good that He’d spared me from a great many troubles in my life without me knowing it. Not happy gas, but maybe something better. And as I looked down and saw my son wince when he tried to swallow, I knew that all the happy gas in the world couldn’t take away all the pain. Some still lingered.

That was true for all of us, I supposed. We were all a collection of bruises and cuts. We all had our tender places.

And I thought that in the end, it was our pain and not our happiness that brought us nearer to heaven.