kristenmallen

March 24, 2019March 24, 2019

Memento Mori? How Can I Forget?

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We are flying through Lent, and I have yet to post my acceptance of Mary’s challenge. That is because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in mortality. It’s been overwhelming.

I began this season with a trip to one of the world’s foremost cancer treatment centers. A long-time friend recently had a bone marrow transplant and needed a ride. There were easily a hundred people in the waiting room, from all over the world, all in the fight of their lives. I described it to my husband as “a roomful of fight.” The will to live was palpable in that space.

Then I went to a funeral for a woman who had lived a long life, and who had suffered with difficult health challenges for many years. Still, her passing came as a shock to her family.

Then my stepdad had surgery, in a state over a thousand miles away. I struggled to focus on my work at home, knowing he was in an operating room, and my mother was waiting there alone. The surgery wasn’t for a life-threatening condition, but it was a reminder that our bodies aren’t built to last forever.

Then a friend’s father passed away. Also in a state over a thousand miles away.

Then a friend’s grandson was born eleven weeks too soon.

Then, the day he came home from the hospital, my stepdad called to tell me that our family dog, Fenway, had died. I have no idea if animals have souls or not, and I am not open to arguing about it. I can tell you that Fenway was family, and it is as true and painful a loss as any other.

Then there was the mass shooting during prayers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. I have cousins in Christchurch who have been sharing their heartache, and their resolve, and their fears, and their beautiful commitment to living as a nation in community.

Then I joined my colleagues getting trained by veteran police officers in how to protect my students during an active shooter incident. I cannot begin to tell you how shaken I was by it.

Then my father-in-law celebrated his 90th birthday with a trip to the ER. Both he and my mother-in-law were diagnosed with the flu. My mother-in-law, was admitted to the hospital for a three-day stay.

Then the last member of my grandmother’s generation, my great aunt Mary, age 95, passed away.

Among the practices I have been doing throughout this season is a daily Memento Mori Examen. I review the day by asking myself these questions:

How did God love me today?
How did I show others the love of God today?
If this is my last moment, how did the loving measure up?

I have not kept up with all of the reading and journaling that I could be doing through this Lenten devotion, but I have not missed a day of the examen. It is a beautiful, powerful practice. Death comes for us all. In light of that, how am I living? It’s a lens angle shift that I am grateful for.

February 25, 2019February 25, 2019

Poetry Challenge Update

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We are heading into the final days of February. I realized yesterday that I have done a lousy job letting anyone—even Mary—know how I am doing with the poetry challenge. To everyone’s surprise, especially my own, I feel like I’ve done really well with this.

I’ve read a least one poem a day. I’ve read a few chapbooks, and a collection of poems. I’ve come across some new (to me) poets, and revisited some old favorites.

Yeats Keats and Shakespeare Langston Hughes Nikki Giovanni Mary Oliver Shel Silverstein

Seamus Heaney Maya Angelou Edgar Allen Poe Kazim Ali Anne Sexton e.e. cummings

Ocean Vuong…

I’ve touched base with a bunch of my poet friends. (Seriously, guys, for someone who proclaims to have rid her life of poetry, I have a LOT of poet friends! It’s pretty great.)

I’ve even looked at some of the poetry I wrote in a course I took with Joanna Penn Cooper and revised a few pieces. (They still need a LOT of work.)

Some things I’ve learned:

Like my taste in music, which is VERY broad, my taste in poetry is all over the map. (I’m MULTI-FACETED people.)
Poetry is part of how I learn about someone and about their culture—how individuals and how their people handle their big emotions and big events (births, deaths, weddings, etc.) shows up in their poetry. I had forgotten what a beautiful way of engaging with others. I’m glad I remembered.
Turns out I never really swept poetry out of my life. As practical and efficient as I have become, I have in fact kept a steady stream of poetry in my soul that reveals itself in my teaching, in my prayers, in my dreams.

Where is the poetry in your life? What poems do you hold dear?

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February 17, 2019February 17, 2019

Ndi Igisigo—I Am a Poem

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Photo of the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda photo by Kristen Allen

I dreamed about Rwanda again last night.

I was walking down a red clay road. School children in matching uniforms were running and laughing in a group ahead of me. The air smelled of eucalyptus and smoke. The diminutive Sister Donatella was holding my arm, grinning from ear to ear. In her French roast coffee accent, she is telling me about unshakeable faith. Her joie de vivre should be a contradiction. She, herself, has survived unspeakable horrors, with amazing courage, and a tenacity for her country that usually brings to mind decorated war heroes. Yet, here she is encouraging me as we walk through Kigali…

Road in Kigali, Rwanda photo by Matt Brennan

When I was a little girl, I saw a National Geographic special about Dian Fossey. Like every kid my age, I was fascinated by her work with apes. That her death was a mystery made Fossey even more compelling to me. Add the gorgeous Nat Geo footage of central Africa in what is now Rwanda and I was hooked. It was a childhood dream to travel to the Virunga Mountains to meet the “gorillas in the mist” myself.

And then it happened.

Through a series of incredible events, I was able to chaperone two student trips to the Land of a Thousand Hills in 2012 and 2013. As anyone who has ever experienced a culture and geography so different from their own will tell you, those months in Rwanda changed me in very real, very powerful ways. It was more than my broadened worldview, though. In my very core, I am changed.

I still dream about Rwanda often, waking up homesick for the place and its people.

Over the years, I have read dozens of history and ethnographic studies of Rwanda—about Dian Fossey and the apes, yes, but also the nation’s colonization, the ongoing redistribution of borders, the genocide of 1994, the rebuilding of the nation since. It makes for both sobering and inspiring reading.

It is the music, dance, design, and poetry of the nation that has most deeply moved me, though. By my second trip to Rwanda, I had come to know enough about the people I had met (enough to not generalize the entire population of the nation) to start to be able to see the world through their eyes, and not my American eyes.

Their art has been key to helping me do that.

There is a fluidity to Rwandan traditional dance and pop music that also shows up in their poetry. At first, I thought it was a sharp contrast to the tenacity of the people who continue to farm on steep mountain slopes; the persistence of a people rebuilding their families, communities, and nation post-genocide.

I thought their art would be somehow sharper, rockier. Now I see how Rwandan art moves the way flowing water over time will shape landscapes, smooth stones, carve canyons. Sometimes it’s just a trickle. Sometimes it’s whitewater. On it flows, though, shaping a nation.

Mountain Stream in Butare, Rwanda photo by Kristen Allen

Here are some spoken word poets for you to check out:

8 Spoken Word Poets Breaking Boundaries in Rwanda

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Thunderstorm in Virunga Mountains over Lake Kivu, Rwanda photo by Kristen Allen

February 7, 2019

When a Poem Gets You

Guernsey, Channel Islands photo by Kristen Allen

I am pretty sure it is a law in New England that all elementary school students must memorize some bit of Robert Frost poetry. Mrs. Burke’s grade 4 reading class went with “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I still can recite it today, complete with a Doris Kearns Goodwin Boston accent.

That wasn’t the poem that hooked me, though. Rather, it was this little bit of gentle verse by Rachel Field, “If Once You Have Slept on an Island.” Field was a children’s author, best known, probably, for her Newbery Award winning story, Hitty, the First Hundred Years, and for her Caldecott winner, Prayer for a Child. The poem appeared in the reading textbook Mrs. Burke, and all the fourth grade reading classes in our school district, and probably in hundreds of school districts, used. It wasn’t considered a classic of poetry. Likely, it was included in the reader to support that week’s spelling or vocabulary list.

But for me, a child who had happy memories walking on Castle Island in South Boston with her Grampie, and spent her summers on Cape Cod with her extended family, this poem captured a bit of her soul. I knew the sound of wheeling gulls. I had felt, really felt tides beat through my sleep.

Decades and decades later, I still know this poem by heart. When my flight response gets to be too much to ignore, I’ll tell someone, “Sometimes a girl has to spend time on an island, ” and I’ll head to Aquidneck Island (where Newport is), or my parents’ home on the island in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee, or somewhere that will bring back that calm, that feeling of tides beating through my sleep.

Spending time on islands, and by the shore changed me, like the poem said. As a fourth grader, I couldn’t articulate that, but Rachel Field did in those simple lines.

Poetry does that.

February 3, 2019February 3, 2019

February Dare: Have a Love Affair with Poetry

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My month of experimenting with visual arts was, well, less than I had hoped. I did some water color painting, and I created some colored pencil mandalas on butcher paper with my preschool students. I picked up a long-abandoned needlework project. It wasn’t much.

My refusal to fully engage in this challenge, despite publicly stating that I was going to do it, shows me that I have more to poke at here. Truthfully, I really enjoyed those small efforts. A lot. So, why did I not do more? The horror of being incompetent at something is powerful, indeed. It seems it is even more powerful than my concern about breaking the commitment I made here.

I have left my art portfolio on my desk as a reminder of what is possible. When I get out of my own way, and push past the foolish belief that “I suck at this stuff” I experience that beautiful moment of delight in the process, the sheer joy of creating. I want to do more of that. Equally importantly, I want to conquer my fear of inadequacy.

So, my needlepoint supplies are staying out, I will join my students in their joyful abandonment in painting, drawing, and collaging.

And I will read and listen to poetry.

I am a writer, but I am not a poet. It is another one of those mediums that I avoid because of my fear of being terrible. It is also, I have just realized, another one of those things that I have lost along the way, as I have become pragmatic and practical and responsible and adult. Just as I have given up ritual and magic in so much of my life, I have given up poetry.

I want it back. Some things just cannot be expressed in a five paragraph essay or a 150 character Tweet. Some things cannot be worked out in a bulleted list. Some things need rhythm, alliteration, metaphor, lyric. Some things need to be expressed out loud. Big questions and big feelings that cannot be contained in a sentence need a stanza.

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem,
that is. ~ Theodore Roethke

February 1, 2019

Think About Such Things

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Philippians 4:8 New International Version (NIV)

⁸Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

I am all shouted out. Social media, television news, even sports radio, for Pete’s sake, is filled with angry people ranting about politics, religion, the economy, and even football. I am not even going to rehash any of the issues, you all know what they are, and I am out of bandwidth for all this vitriol. (Although, for the record, the Saints got robbed, man. I sure would have loved to see them up against my beloved Patriots.)

I feel battered. Just from casual conversations, I know that I am not alone. It has been like getting caught into a rip current that is sweeping us out over our heads.

A preacher I once heard taught that if it made it into the Bible, then it is something that the Good Lord knew that all future generations would need to read.

Clearly, this is not the first time humans have all gotten under each other’s skins. Back in the day, the folks in Philippi found themselves at the point where they Could Not Even. Paul hit them with a truth bomb. What you think about matters. What you think about changes you. If you want to change for the better, think about better stuff.

Preach, Brother.

You cannot swim across a rip current, it will just pull you farther out to sea, and exhaust you in the process. You have to swim along it, then angle yourself to ride the tide back into shore. So, I know that I cannot keep arguing with strangers on FaceBook or screaming at the evening news. It is exhausting me and turning me into the very thing I am fighting against.

That does not mean I am quitting the good fight. I will not stick my head in the sand and forget about the very real, very important issues of our day. We all still need to advocate for the poor and the oppressed. We still need to fight abuse in our churches, government, and community. We still need to be a voice for the voiceless.

It’s just that I need a lens angle shift. How about you?

The scripture admonishes us to think about the things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. Make a list. Count your blessings. As the psalmist says, “meditate on them day and night.”

So, in all of the bluster, I need to find the truth in the stories, align myself with the folks in the fights that are noble and admirable, call out the lovely, beautiful things people are doing. Think about such things.

January 22, 2019January 22, 2019

Hope Doesn’t Go On Furlough: Teachers Helping Teachers Help Families

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The government shutdown has caused so many issues (here is a running list of some of the real-world consequences), that discouragement is natural. For the remainder of the shutdown we will be sharing the ways people are stepping up to help each other, proving that humans can show empathy and not behave like ninnies. Feel free to share any that you see on our Facebook page, and please join in to help when you can.

You may or may not know that besides writing this blog with Mary, I am a long-time early childhood educator. For more than thirty years, I have worked with young children, parents, and some of the most dedicated professionals on the planet. Today’s story of people stepping up to help neighbors who are furloughed from their federal jobs hits close to home.

A dear friend and colleague, Cheryl Hovey, from EzEd2Go, will provide two hours of free professional development training on Brain Development to the staff of any licensed child care provider within 20 miles of Warwick, Rhode Island who will give a family furloughed from their federal job a free week of tuition.

“I’m hoping other providers will follow in my footsteps,” Cheryl told me yesterday while we were chatting about this.

To that end, I am not only sharing her offer here on the blog, but I, too, will also take her challenge. For any licensed child care provider within a 25 mile radius of Waltham, MA who offers furloughed families a week of free tuition, I will offer two hours of free professional development training on Trauma-Informed Care or Behavior Management.

If you are a teacher-trainer who wishes to join our challenge, or you are a licensed child care director or family child care provider who is willing to provide tuition breaks to furloughed families, you can reach out to our Facebook page . We will help you spread the word and connect you to each other.

January 20, 2019January 20, 2019

Hope Doesn’t Go on Furlough:Making Art & Music Free

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Musuems and symphonies across the country are offering free admission to furloughed federal workers. May an afternoon of beauty bring some joy and peace in these troubled days.

January 7, 2019January 7, 2019

Accepting the Challenge to Create

Skyline view of the Boston Public Garden, oil pastel by Kristen Allen

In the beginning, God created a writer. And it was good. Still, the writer was convinced that she could not draw, paint, or sculpt. Visual arts were not a gift meant for her to enjoy.

By and large, I suck at visual arts. I have some challenges with spatial relations, and getting things out of my head onto a canvas or drawing pad rarely works out. It’s just not my jam. I am a Word Girl through and through. I even dream in narrative. Seriously, most of my dreams have an off-screen narrator telling me what I am watching.

As my husband was putting our Christmas decorations away in the attic, he came across some boxes that needed repacking. As luck would have it (or the Almighty Creator willed it), he found the only art portfolio I have ever assembled. It was for the drawing class I had to take in order to get my final three fine arts credits to graduate with my BS degree. Oh, I dreaded that class. I hate sucking at things, and here I was paying an obscene amount of money to suck at something that someone else was going to judge and assign a grade to.

The class was life-changing. The professor, Iris, was a quirky, earthy-crunchy, painter-teacher-spiritualist. I could not help but love her. This was a summer course, so she had some liberty to do some unconventional things—like have the class meet at a different location around Boston each week. We went to the Arnold Arboretum, the Boston Public Garden, the top of a campus building in Porter Square in Cambridge, and we even took a boat out to Thompson’s Island in the middle of the Boston Harbor, one perfect summer day. (You may know the island as the site for the film, based on the Dennis Lehane novel, Shutter Island.)

Slowly, but surely, throughout the course, my perception of the lofty “ART” changed. I found that I began to look at the world differently. First I started noticing details, then color, light and shadow, texture. I began to see in pictures, not just in narrative.

The most remarkable change was when I was sitting under a tree, by one of the abandoned school buildings, on Thompson’s Island. I realized that I had started thinking about WORDS differently. I was seeing narrative descriptions in terms of color and texture. Words began to have a flavor. A new phrase would swirl around my mouth like the first taste sample from a bottle of fine wine. I suddenly understood toddlers’ compulsion to repeat a word or phrase incessantly, a preschooler’s delight in reading the same story over and over.

That class was a very long time ago. I still suck at drawing and painting. I still cannot cut a straight line. I still am not a visual artist.

I am a writer.

I am a writer who has a better understanding of the gifts that paintings, drawings, statuary, pottery, needlework are. I am a writer who is looking forward to seeing—and experiencing—my visual artist sisters’ and brothers’ view of the world for a bit. I’m a writer hungry for some new colors, textures, flavors.

December 29, 2018December 29, 2018

Today’s Sign of Hope: A Demonstration of Glee

Photo by Andy Allen

I already noted that this Christmas has been unlike any Christmas I’ve ever experienced. One of the biggest changes was not hosting at my home in wintery New England. Instead, my husband, two of my children, and my brother have come to Florida to celebrate at my parents’ new home.

I will admit to feeling a bit unrooted by this.

Yes, I know, I am still with (most) of the people I love best in the world. We have feasted and feasted and feasted. We have played games, laughing uproariously. We’ve seen beautiful Christmas lights.

Still I’ve struggled. Then something absolutely astonishing happened.

After Christmas breakfast–outside, on the lanai–we went for a boat ride. As we left the canal and entered the bay, my brother spotted a dolphin. We watched it breach the water and then swim alongside the boat. So nifty.

Then suddenly, we were surrounded by dolphins. We had cruised into a pod of at least eight young ones. My Mama noted that they must have known that “they have the day off of school” and were out to play. They seemed to be racing one another. Before we knew it, they were leaping and diving and flipping, playing in the wake of our boat. None of us, not even my folks, had ever experienced anything like this. It was the very illustration of “glee.”

And in that moment, I knew that we would all be able to create new traditions, and find new joys in the season.