Author Archives: Debra Darvick

His Lens/My Pen –– A Single Point of Light

There must be something in the air at the Song of the Morning retreat center in Vanderbilt, Michigan. The only two photos I have contributed to the His Lens/My Pen series were both from there. The first one was taken last fall. I captured the image above during a walk in the woods one spring morning. The river was flowing full and swiftly after an early morning rain shower; the trees above me were still shaking off its remnants. Then the clouds parted, the sun took prominence, and Mother Nature bestowed yet another gift of beauty. I stood mesmerized for nearly fifteen minutes. Pure visual magic as the water shattered shafts of sunlight into particles and set them to dancing in the currents of the river.

It’s so hard to walk lightly through our lives. There are kids to worry about; health issues to contend with; relationships to sustain, mend, tend and sustain again. Jobs to seek, keep, and sometimes leap from or toward with all that attendant uncertainty. Not to mention the maelstrom of malevolence and mayhem streaming daily from our various screens electronic devices. As I study this photograph again and again, I realize that what makes the scene so extraordinary is the atomization of the light, each daub of sunlight is bouncing to its own rhythm. Sometimes that’s all we can do, too. Just be who we are – a single point of light interacting as best as we can with life’s inevitable flow.

Immerse yourself in the flow of this image by clicking on it. Share it with your friends on Facebook. Or order the card from my Etsy Shop. Enjoy.

Go See Boyhood!

It’s a rare summer when Mr. and Mrs. Darvick see two movies in a month. This is that rare summer and Boyhood is the latest movie we have seen. And loved.

Funny how both movies we’ve seen run to themes of family bonding with sons at the center. (For those of you who missed it, we saw Chef, too.)

Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over 12 years, capturing actor Ellar Coltrane’s yearly development from childhood to adulthood. The film opens with young Coltrane as a 6-year-old and progresses until his high school graduation at 18. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke play his parents; Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei plays his sister.

The movie was mesmerizing. Each year was its own tightly spun vignette caught up in whatever milestones and miseries are there to be lived at the time. Each year segues into the next at just the right moment. And because the scenes fit together so seamlessly, it was sometimes startling to see Coltrane’s character Mason mature before our eyes. In this time-lapse growth, I found myself watching the movie alongside memories of my own son’s transitions. Any mom of a son will connect with 10-year-old boy innocence, when they still smell sweet, when they will still cuddle with you, when they are still playful as puppies. She will also remember the turbulent times, and then recall those tentatively hopeful times when the ground seems to have solidified again, as if overnight.

The movie stayed with me for quite a few days and the more I thought about it, I began to feel almost, well not embarrassed exactly, but awed in a way that I had seen such an intimate portrait of a child’s growth to adulthood. I wasn’t expecting that feeling. This wasn’t a movie in the way we go to the movies expecting to experience a story. What I experienced in Boyhood‘s two and a half hours was a life unfurling before my very eyes. And while there was a script, it was loosely framed. In part, Linklater drew his scene plotting for each year’s filming from whatever might have been happening in Ellar Coltrane’s own life.

Home movies are one thing—you see a birthday party, you relive a graduation or a recital. Boyhood was something entirely different. It made me wonder what it would have been like to see my own life stitched together in such fashion.

Nah. Better to leave this to Hollywood. Although I can see a new industry being born—the “boyhooding” of all those troves of family videos.

His Lens/My Pen #12 — These Geese Aren’t Silly

When I saw this goose couple that Martin snapped at a park in Virginia, I laughed out loud and wished I spoke goose, the better to understand what they might have been honking at one another. Sometimes Martin’s photos speak to me immediately (though not in goose). A lesson or meditation to accompany the image arrives swiftly. This couple, however had me stymied.

What was the deeper wisdom waiting to be drawn from this shot?

I love the contrast in their goose necks and their postures because it looks like they are having one serious conversation. But while reaching for an accompanying text, I didn’t want to attribute rigidity to Mr. Goose on the right, nor submission to Ms. Goose on the left. See? Already I’m attributing rigidity and aggression to the gander and submission to the goose. I wanted to anthropomorphize this pair and their exchange, but did not want to make one the winner of the conversation and one the loser. I returned to the image again and again, always coming up with um, a goose egg.

Then it hit me. Both postures are ambiguous and open to interpretation. Is the goose on the left being submissive or flexible? What about the goose on the right? How many times is perceived rigidity more truthfully maintaining one’s principles in the face of silliness or societal pressure. And just like that, the puzzle of what to say about this image cracked open.

We can be quick to judge when a “discussion” we are having isn’t going our way. We might summon labels – rigid, unfeeling, wishy-washy, spineless – in hopes that such critical words will goad our partner into changing his or her position. This month’s His Lens/My Pen image is a reminder to keep the labeling at bay. To my eye, Ms. Goose and Mr. Gander are telling us to move past reflexive judgment, and strive to see a situation from a perspective other than our own.

Enjoy the geese in a larger format by clicking on the image.

Is there a teen in the house who mistakes your principles for rigidity? Or someone who needs reminding that being flexible on an important issue doesn’t mean caving? Order this card from my Etsy shop. The world can always use a little more understanding.

Reviewing Chef: a real feel-good movie

Reading Ross Douthat’s essay, The Parent Trap, reminded me of another reason I liked the movie Chef so much. (Requisite spoiler alert here: I’m going to spill everything. If you haven’t seen it and plan to, close your computer and head to your local theater. Now.) I’ll get to Douthat’s essay in a minute. For now, here’s what I loved about Chef:

It was delightful. Basic premise—a once cutting-edge chef finds himself out of work due to creative differences with the owner of his restaurant and a bitter Twitter exchange with a food critic that goes viral. He is also a divorced dad who doesn’t quite have the knack of spending four-star quality time with son.

His four-alarm chili of a Latina ex-wife has been encouraging him to open a food truck. When the shitake hits the fan at the restaurant, Chef accompanies his ex-wife and their child on a family visit to Miami where her second ex-husband (Chef being the first) stakes him to a run-down food truck. He and his son (along with a sous-chef from the restaurant) make a cross-country trip back to LA, serving up kick-ass Cubano sandwiches every stop they make. The son cooks and texts, tweets and vines the whole way, ensuring hungry crowds wherever they go. By the end, father and son are tight as bagels and lox, he remarries his wife, and the food critic stakes him to opening his own restaurant.

I kept waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me. I kept waiting for that air-tight never-to-be- compromised plot device where the hero is held back from achieving his goal, where he faces huge conflict and betrayals, where he loses big before learning the ultimate lesson. But there were none. Chef never falters or screws up. His son never cuts off a finger with the set of knives his dad buys him; the department of health never cites them for infractions; his former co-worker remains an integral part of the team, never once trying to wrestle away his success.

What also never happens is that social services doesn’t bring the dad up on child abuse charges for employing a minor and/or sequestering him in an unwholesome and potentially dangerous fire-hazard environment. This is where Douthat’s essay comes into play. Douthat wrote about the increasing way parenting (as we once knew it) is coming under fire. Parents have been brought up on neglect charges for letting their kids walk home at dusk, for leaving an 11-year-old in a car while dashing in to pick up a quart of milk, and most outrageous, police were called when someone saw a five- and seven-year-old run across a parking lot alone. Their parents didn’t know; the parking lot was near the kids’ houses. Really. Someone called the police.

I guess this is what I loved best about Chef: a father and son have an adventure replete with sharp knives, hot flames, serving food to strangers, driving long distances without bathroom stops (this definitely wouldn’t have worked with a daughter), making friends and rebuilding their relationship mile after mile. And no one says Boo.

I say Yay. And even if I’ve spoiled the movie, go see it. Even spoiled, Chef will leave a great taste in your heart.

Debra Darvick reviews Robert J. Wicks’ book ‘Perspective’

Brother, courage comes and goes. Hold on for the next supply.
Thomas Merton

The first three years of my son’s life, I kept a daily journal. Unbelievable, right? Through diapers and colic, first teeth and first words, I made time to record the wonder of our days.

Somewhere in those pages, sleep-starved and overwhelmed I wrote, “I just want to have perspective! I want to know that everything is going to turn out OK.”

Years later I found the journal and began rereading it. I couldn’t help but smile at the mother I was so long ago. Rereading that dramatic and universal cri de coeur, I realized what was impossible to grasp as a new mother: By its very definition, perspective requires time and distance from the very thing one strives so hard to see clearly.

I thought of that journal page when Robert J. Wicks’ book Perspective: The Calm Within the Storm came my way. Instead of time and distance, Wicks guides readers to perspective by “improv[ing] our sense of reality and acceptance of it.” The personal growth goals Wicks writes about are not new, but his approach is worth considering for those who strive for a healthy perspective.

Wicks structured this clear and useful book so that it is rich with bullet points, questionnaires for self-reflection, and carefully honed text bytes that can form the basis for a lifetime of step-by-step personal transformation. In addition to explication, educative text and recollections drawn from his own life and that of other seekers, philosophers, and authors, Wicks shares insights culled from the most up-to-date research in cognitive behavioral therapy and the psychology of optimism.

The chapter I found most intriguing focused on achieving perspective on one’s “personal darkness.” Recognizing that trauma is a part of life, Wicks invites readers to acknowledge trauma as a terrible experience and then recognize its potential as an opportunity for powerful growth and meaning. Reading this chapter, I was reminded of a quote by Thich Naht Hahn: No mud, no lotus.

The young perspective-seeking mother I was might have written that in her journal. And even though I long ceased writing about my children each day, as blessed as we have been, I sometimes still wish I could be assured that everything will turn out OK.

: First page of the journal begun when Elliot was three months old. The apologia in red at the top of the page refers to a first three months of feeding and wiping…

Care to read more?

A NOTE from ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm …

ROBERT WICKS INTERVIEW—Related to Debra’s review, you also will enjoy our in-depth interview with Dr. Robert J. Wicks about his new book.
GET DEBRA’S BOOK—ReadTheSpirit Books produces important books covering interfaith and cross-cultural issues and is proud to publish Debra’s signature collection of real-life stories, This Jewish Life. In this wide-ranging collection of true stories, Debra carries readers through an entire year with dozens of men, women and young people who shape their lives around their shared Judaism. Whatever your faith, This Jewish Life is an adventure in meaningful living. Using Dr. Robert J. Wicks’s language: It’s a book with a valuable perspective on life.

Happy Birthday, Elliot

My boy has a big birthday coming up soon. How did the years fly so swiftly?

Decades ago, soon after my pregnancy was confirmed, I began getting boy vibes. This was confirmed by everyone once I began “to show” (quaint last-century euphemism for this century’s “baby bump.”)

I carried high. A boy! one neighbor predicted. I was glowing. Definitely a boy, declared Aunt Ruth. You NEVER contradicted Aunt Ruth, and so I began thinking up boy names. As the weeks progressed and the bump turned into a bulge and then a behemoth, it felt like my abdomen had been invaded by rock ’em sock ’em robots. Boy, definitely boy, said a co-worker whose wife’s second cousin had three sons and who swore each one behaved as if her uterus were Madison Square Gardens boxing ring.

As the eldest of three sisters and the daughter of one of three sisters, boys never registered for much of my youth. They were pretty much an alien species until sixth grade when I developed a huge crush on Edward Lamb. What if my intuition, the neighbor, Aunt Ruth and that second cousin who named her sons Evander, Sonny and Tyson were right? What would it be like to raise a son?

I could have never imagined over those nine months the myriad of unexpected delights that awaited me—the thrill of watching utter physical abandon as my son raced across fields, his childhood obsession with tools, his lifelong passion for cars, a spur-of-the-moment jump into a lake to dog paddle with a Labrador Retriever.

There was the nightly heart-brimming joy of peeking into his room to watch him sleep, and the pride of watching him graduate from high school and then college. There was the frantic trip to the emergency room to stitch up the cut to his inner cheek when he decided to play trampoline on the toilet seat. There were dandelion bouquets, endless readings of Richard Scarry books, and a Mother’s Day poem a few years back whose pages I bound within beautiful paper and keep by my bedside. There was also that tumultuous fifteenth year when querulous aliens possessed his body. They departed as swiftly as they arrived, returning to us the familiar kind, thoughtful, funny, creative son who suddenly needed a razor and had an unending affinity for Polo aftershave.

My boy has a big birthday coming up soon. Aunt Ruth and the others never told me about the singular sweetness of boys and a mother’s astonishment at their manliness. How did such a big man come from me? I have watched my son triumph in achievement, and grieve as some dreams were set aside. He has never allowed the former to swell his head nor the latter to curtail his future. My hopes for him expand to include his sweet and beautiful wife. And a baby bump one day?

My boy has a big birthday coming up, and so I wish for him the realization of all his dreams and more. May he be blessed with health and long life, with laughter and good deeds. May he come to know the joy of parenthood and to remember, should aliens ever possess his teen-aged children, they will depart as swiftly as they arrived.

Take the Plunge!

During a rare break in the frigid Coldzilla winter this year, Martin and I walked to nearby Quarton Lake. We watched as one brave duck left his compatriots huddling on a shelf of ice and dove into the freezing water. Until he shared the photo with me, I’d forgotten that my husband had captured the moment.

“See what you might come up with for this one,” Martin said. I loved the image. It was so rich with possibilities, what with the ducks embodying all sorts of metaphorical human reactions to taking the plunge in life.

We’ve all been each of these ducks, haven’t we? Who of us hasn’t turned away, or watched from the sidelines of the dance floor, aching for the gumption to ditch our self-consciousness and rock out to the beat? Hopefully, more than hugging the shore or tucking head into wing, we have also headed out for adventure, paddling uncertainly perhaps yet gaining buoyancy and direction as we go forth. Whether it’s moving to a new city, leaving the comfort of a steady job to pursue a dream, embarking solo on vacation or speaking truths everyone else wants kept below the surface, there is always one brave duck who dives in first, hopefully inspiring others. I no longer remember if or how many followed Mr. Mallard above but surely some did.

Is there a special duckling in your life who needs a bit of encouragement before taking the plunge? Or a graduate who is ready to take flight? Head on over to my Etsy shop where this card and others are waiting for you. Or buck up your entire circle of friends in one fell swoop! Send them a link to this column or post it on FB.

What’s going to be your take-the-plunge-moment this week? Dive in and share the time you held back. What did you learn? How did you use the lesson to modify your life?