Statio: a sacred pause

Michael Peterson OSB, a monk of St. John's Abbey in Minnesota, had a reflection in Give Us This Day in April that has stuck with me. He writes of the monastic practice of "statio", where the monks line up two by two to process in to the church proper for a liturgy. It is, he says, a chance for a sacred pause, a chance to stop and collect oneself to be sure, but also a chance to reflect on what God is calling you to do, here and now, to consider what you believe and why. A full intentional stop.

I'm at the very start of a sabbatical leave. An intentional stop, a full year pause in my teaching. This reflection is a reminder that my vocation (unlike the pneumonia vaccine I got this week) is not "one and done". It is the relentless call of God, shaping and reshaping my life.

So, yes, the sabbatical is for rest and renewal, a stop, but it's also a sacred time for growth. I'm getting ready to retire from teaching, one more year after I return from sabbatical. "What next?" I wonder. "What now?" I ask God.  

Pause. 

Stop. 

Breathe. 

Listen.

________________

Reflection is here.

Deliquescent: I am melting

I am currently reading "Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair" by Christian Wiman. It is part poetry, part lyric essay, and part commonplace book. In the third entry he quotes Imre Kertész, "under certain circumstances... words lose their substance... they simply deliquesce..." Kertész is, I think, referring to grief, but I was struck by the Dali-esque image of melting words that deliquesce implies. It is originally a term from chemistry, referring to the process by which a salt absorbs water from the atmosphere and turns into a solution. Looking for all the world like it is melting away, but of course it has not. All the ions that were in the salt are still present, simply now unseen in the water, and the water that swirled around the salt unseen is now made manifest. 

Ten entries later deliquesce appears again, this time in a long ouroboric discourse on snakes. I look deliquesce up, wondering what the non-chemists make of it. Metaphorically, suggests Merriam-Webster, it means to soften, perhaps with age. Am I deliquescing as I write? (Certainly as I age.) Pulling something unseen from the air, making it manifest, while I myself vanish? Still there, tucked unseen between those water molecules...those words. 

It makes me think of efflorescence, where water flows through a salt, dissolving it, carrying it to the surface where it then turns back into a solid. But instead of the tidy crystalline packing, now it looks like flowers have erupted on the surface. Perhaps that's another metaphor for my writing, looking for what's in the depths to carry it up to the surface where it can flower. (Or lose its intended structure -- not an image I'd chose.)

All things visible and invisible. All things exchanging and interchanging.

_______

Sodium hydroxide is what I think of as the iconic ionic substance that deliquesces.

Daughters of the moon

One of the delights of graduation is standing in line, well not the standing-in-line part, but the who-I'm-standing-in-line-with part, sometimes with colleagues I haven't seen since last commencement. I am privileged to work with some pretty amazing people, and this year stood across from a colleague who is an award-winning poet (she won a Guggenheim!). We chatted about the moon, its moods and modes, how it can seem to loom so large in certain places. Her students, she tells me, are in love with the moon. My students, I confess, not so much.

We wondered what it might be like to swap classes, perhaps my students could learn to swoon over the moon as hers do, and perhaps her students might enjoy raiding my language for their own purposes. I would tell them about the daughters of the moon, that carry the history of their mothers with them in their cores, bearing it forward billions of years. A process in which decay does not mean loss and despair, but instead transformation and eventual stability.

My students are peevish about the moon because of a problem we worked about dating the rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. It's a problem that crosses two of the topics we've discussed, chemical kinetics and nuclear chemistry. I'm fond of the problem because it uses material from the very beginning of the course and from the very end and shows both how they are connected and can be used in a very practical way by another field. But making connections can be challenging, and at the end of the semester my students are tired. They are less intrigued and more resigned.

The moon, like the earth and pretty much everything on it, contains radioactive elements. Sometimes these radioactive atoms are versions of stable elements, sometimes all of the versions of an element are radioactive. (Carbon-14 is radioactive while the most common carbon atoms on earth, called carbon-12, are not. On the other hand, there are no stable versions of uranium.) Radioactive elements are like tiny clocks, transforming themselves from one element into another at a particular and fixed rate. Comparing the amounts of a radioactive element at two different times can tell you the time spanned. For example, if an artifact like a wooden carving has 50% of the carbon-14 that it had when it was made, 5500 years have elapsed since its creation. We say carbon-14 has a half-life of 5500 years.

These built-in atomic clocks can run on short timescales, a matter of days or seconds, or on incredibly long timescales. The rule of thumb is that a given radioisotope can measure out time spans up to 10 times the half-life. So carbon-14 can be used to date materials up to about 55,000 years old. Potassium-40, the main reason human beings themselves are radioactive, has a half-life of 1.3 billion years and can time processes going back to the Big Bang.    

Uranium-238 gives birth to daughters such as thorium-234, radium-226 and polonium-218. (I note that some of these daughters were discovered by a daughter and a mother, Marie Curie.) Eventually all her energy is exhausted and U-238 finally plops down onto the island of stability as lead-206. This is not a short process, it takes 45 billion years for (nearly) all of the U-238 to find its way to the stable space of lead-206. But her daughters will hold tight to her history all along the way.  And we can read it in their very identities.  

Itadakimasu: wearing gratitude

“Itadakimasu," a Japanese word said before eating, roughly translates as "I humbly receive." It's an expression of gratitude for the meal and for those who prepared it. When I traveled to Japan with students we taught them to say, “Itadakimasu” before any meal.

A film crew from a Japanese news show came on the Friday after my book launched to interview me about the kerfuffle around the salt but also about the making of tea. (You can watch it here, the scene where I make a cup is at the beginning. Yes, it’s in Japanese.)

They had asked me to be prepared to make a cup of tea for them on camera, which I did. When I handed the interviewer the cup that I had made, he murmured, "Itadakimasu." In all the whirlwind of those days that one word — said so quietly, so matter of factly — touched me deeply.

I’m grateful for so much lately. I’m trying to “wear gratitude like a cloak” (to quote Rumi) to let it be what I wrap myself in, to let it be what I show first to the world. Itadakimasu.

Lessons in chemistry

One of the questions I’ve often been asked in the interviews I have done around the tea book has been, “Have you read the book Lessons in Chemistry?” and when I acknowledge that I have, the logical follow up:“What did you think of it?”

The first time the question arose I was surprised, and had to scramble for an answer. I shouldn’t have been. It is a best selling book, it has been made into a series. It has chemistry in the title. The interviewer is fishing for a bridge to what’s in the current cultural zeitgeist. 

But for me the answer is, as the kids say, complicated. Even though the book is set slightly earlier than my time as a graduate student and newly minted scientist, my experiences were not so different from Elizabeth Zott’s. There was enough similarity that it was an uncomfortable read at the start. And then there is the day that Elizabeth‘s partner is suddenly killed. When I was reading the book, it was like a gut punch.  It was as if some enormous hand had picked me up and dumped me back into the confusion and chaos of that April night when Tom died so suddenly. Still, I needed to read to the end. I had to know if Elizabeth made it out of the depths of grief. Truth  be told if I known what the plot was, I wouldn’t have read the book. (I really want something like the website “Does the dog die?” for books. No children in peril, no suddenly grieving widows.)

Of course, to say that I found the book difficult for a very personal reason is not the answer a reporter is looking for. I finally settled on saying that I enjoyed the scenes where Elizabeth gave as good as she got, and that the historical difficulties of being a woman in science inspired me to teach the next generation. True, and truly bland. Next question!