Driving down the 210 Freeway yesterday, I noticed five large birds gracefully soaring over a mountain top. I watched them, and marveled. I remembered a science lesson I had taught the boys a few months ago during our in-depth study of birds: gliding and soaring are different. I had never thought about it before, and maybe I had even used the terms interchangeably on occasion, but they are not the same.

The very fact that a bird can fly is an interesting lesson in physics. It begins with the airfoil, which is the shape of a wing, and then involves flight terms such as air pressure, lift, drag, and thrust.

In the 1700's, a scientist named Daniel Bernoulli performed experiments with objects under water which help us to understand how things are able to fly. Water, like air, applies pressure to everything it touches. Daniel Bernoulli discovered that water moved differently over the top of an airfoil (wing shape) than it did underneath it. Water going over the wing moved faster, while the water moving on the bottom of the wing stayed the same. So, the water on the bottom of the wing pushed up more strongly than the water on the top of the wing pushed down. In the air, this difference in pressure causes lift, and the bird is able to get up off the ground.

The bird must flap its wings to speed up the air moving over its wings and this creates a force called thrust. But even though the speed of the air going over the wing allows lift, staying up in the air is a challenge, because another force called drag pushes against the bird as it flies.

If you watch a bird fly, you see that it flaps its wings for a while and then sort of coasts through the sky with outstretched wings. This is called gliding. The longer the wingspan of the bird, the longer time it can glide, but gradually the bird will drift downward because of the drag on its wings. After a time, the bird will have to start flapping again to overcome the drag and gain lift.

Soaring, on the other hand, is more like surfing for birds. Surfers live to "catch the wave". If a surfer catches a wave, he can then ride it all the way back to the beach. In the air, there are heat waves called thermals that rise up from the ground. Soaring birds are designed to know where these thermals are and then to jump on top of them and ride. In a thermal, the rising warm air will lift the bird higher and higher. Some thermals are very tight and the bird must then soar in a tight circle, but other thermals are very large and the bird can go a great distance before having to turn with the heat wave. Thermals form early in the day, as the ground warms up and that warm air rises, and I imagine that besides the advantage of giving birds a chance to look for food without expending the energy of flying, soaring must also be pretty cool bird recreation.

I think I have periods of gliding and soaring in my life too. Gliding is when I can coast for a time on work or effort I've previously expended. Like, if I clean my house really, really well, I can glide for a time without having to worry about housework and the rooms stay fairly tidy. The drag is (and the pun is completely intended) that life continues to happen and dishes pile up, floors get dirty, and nobody has anything clean to wear. The mess returns and I must flap my wings to get back on top of it all.

Gliding might also be when I eat healthily and exercise regularly and I am able to lose a few pounds or maintain an ideal weight, and so I coast for a while on that effort and jump off the bandwagon to enjoy some guilty indulgences like ice cream, or too many cookies, or the most decadent brownies. Before long, the drag has pushed against me and I must get my butt in gear, literally.

I may also go through periods of spiritual gliding, when I drift away from a daily routine of scripture study, and my prayers become more rote than sincere. I can coast along for a short time on my stored up testimony, but quite soon the drag works against me, and I find myself slipping. I must exercise my spiritual thrust quickly, and flap like mad.

But I have times of soaring in my life, as well. To me, soaring is more personal, when I can "catch the wave" or "ride the thermal" that God has designed me to instinctively find and then it feels so right and so good, that it's almost effortless. It's as if He and I are riding together as co-pilots. We're protected from the drag. No one else can see my thermals, just as the thermals that the hawks ride are invisible to our eyes. But just as I can see the hawks soaring and know that they've found one, I believe those around me can sense when I've found my own thermal and I'm soaring.

I've had times in my life when something that I'm doing becomes so effortless, I feel as though I'm soaring. Sometimes I call it being "in the groove". I think using our God-given talents, or when we are in line with our personal missions in life we are swept up into thermals and we can freely soar. At times when I'm writing, or teaching, or mothering, or playing a piece on the piano, suddenly the effort is gone, and I stretch out my wings, and I soar. I'm soaring when I'm in complete harmony and peace in each of my relationships and I am so filled with pure love that I feel like I must be glowing because of it. I'm soaring when I'm lost in the service of other people. It's as though I'm completely in line with what I was put here to do, and I'm filled with a euphoria that witnesses to me that I've found my thermal.

The trick then, is to balance out the gliding and the soaring, and to know that to everything there is a season. For birds, thermals only form in the early hours of the day. They can't just soar in circles all day, avoiding the work that birds must also do. There are nests to be built, and eggs to lay, and mates to find (well, fortunately the birds get the order right more often than we do!), and young to raise. There is food to be found, and migration to prepare for. They know their season. They know there will be another thermal to ride tomorrow, and though there will be lots of flapping, there will also be some gliding to rest tired wing muscles.

And there will be rejoicing because they can fly.

I felt alone the moment the words left his mouth and came hurdling toward me in slow motion. They punched me in the gut, and tore upwards slashing through the tissues of my heart. It was a miracle that my heart was even still beating after such an attack. He walked out the door, and I sat on the edge of the worn denim couch with my head in my hands. The tears didn’t even need a warm-up, or a dress rehearsal; the sobs came right on cue, in primal roars. Death was here to greet me, I was sure. “This is how I die,” I remember thinking. “Here it is. I’ve always wondered. And this is how it feels. Painful beyond comprehension.” The tightening in my chest stretched downwards, to shake hands with the wrenching in my stomach reaching upwards. I couldn’t even stand upright. A million questions regarding my future survival flooded my brain. I was sure I wouldn’t make it. But the children were hungry, and somebody needed to feed them, which meant standing up, and walking.

In some sort of divine irony, that was the summer of the fire. The Rodeo-Chediski fire originated as two separate fires that merged into one gigantic, blazing inferno of flames that towered one hundred feet high, and eventually became the largest fire in North American history. Few have even heard of Show Low or Cibeque, Arizona, but the fire brought our small, rural wooded mountain community out of obscurity. The sky was an eerie red, and smoke and ash particulates made their way through the screens of even closed windows. News reports became more ominous and threatening as the hours wore on. The fire had jumped the canyon. Now the highway. It was headed straight for our little nobody’s-heard-of-it-town, and I was on my own. My husband had taken his girlfriend and her son to Phoenix to be out of harm’s way. The number of blackened acres grew and grew, and evacuation became inevitable.

It is an interesting thing to do, to walk through one’s home panic-stricken and in shock in order to decide what one will save before it all goes up in flames. I packed my minivan with food, clothing and water for myself and my three children, and in the remaining space I stashed journals; photo albums; baby boxes; the pictures from the walls; and then, I remembered my wedding gown and the box of letters and cards he had written to me during our twelve years of dating, courtship, and marriage. Still holding on; standing up against that fire. Begging, “Don’t let it burn!”

It was a little after 2am when I got the call to evacuate, and I loaded my sleeping children into the van, knees trembling, and headed away from the red sky towards Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I would find safe harbor with my dad. From there, I watched limited news reports on the fire sweeping through our mountain. Houses with too much dead brush around them were being tagged with red ribbons as being unsalvageable. I kept thinking of things I’d forgotten to save. My Christmas ornaments! The home videos! The box in my closet that contained my whole life’s history and was simply labeled, “Jenna’s Memorabilia”. How does one even start to rebuild a life alone?

As we prayed together, my dad pleaded that my house would be spared, yet always added “nevertheless, Thy will be done.” I wanted to curse him. “Do we have to give permission to let it all burn, Dad?” I said. “I mean, really? Haven’t I already lost enough? My husband left me! My family is broken up! Now my house and everything in it? Can’t you stop reminding the Lord that he has the option to take it all?” I was bitter and begrudging and afraid to trust completely in the Lord. I simply could not turn it all over to Him. I wanted to say I was that kind of faithful, but put to the test, I was holding back for sure. I was willing to wheel and deal with the God of heaven, filling my prayers with compromises He might consider as alternative paths for my life, if He would just forego burning my entire life to the ground.

From my Journal, dated June 23, 2002:
“This fire is now the biggest in the nation and is burning the size of the city of Los Angeles. It’s ¼ mile away now, and firefighters say that embers will be falling soon, starting fires in town. Watching the coverage is a surreal experience. It’s a breathtaking sight, until you realize that you recognize the scenery, and the scenery is home.”

I baked cookies to occupy my mind and hands. It made me cry and miss being a wife. I threw in the chocolate chips that I’d been leaving out of the dough for ten years to make his favorite cookies. I went into my room and fell to my knees, in despair. And then, upon rising, I made a list I titled “Things I Know for Sure”. It is a two-page list of all the things that deep in my heart, I value as sure knowledge. One of those items was “The Lord is aware of me and the circumstances of my life. He knows my pain and sorrow, and the deepest yearnings of my heart.” And upon writing that, the peace flooded through me. I prayed again, and gave it all to Him. Take my house. Take everything in it. I am yours.

A change happened within me that day, and that night I had a dream. In my dream, my children and I drove back home to our house in Show Low with trepidation and found it untouched by the fire and whole in every way. There were ashes around that had blown in from the wind, but no damage. I had the feeling that the Lord didn’t want to take everything from me; He simply wanted me to be willing to give it.

A week later, it was finally safe to go home. Almost 450,000 acres had been burned. It was like entering a ghost town, and I felt a spirit of reverence. This was now holy ground. Many hundreds of people had lost lifetimes of possessions, but true to my dream, my house was untouched by the fire. Charred leaves littered my yard, and everything inside the closed-up house had a film of ash on it, but it was whole. It had remained standing.

Like me.

The beautiful thing about wildfire is not just its awe-inspiring power and force, but the legacy it leaves behind. Fire is a gift to nature. Forests, after a time, need fire, and they even grow back greener and healthier after being incinerated and blackened into moonscapes beyond recognition. Life returns, even more vibrantly than before.

Ten days after coming home, a judge declared my marriage dissolved. Burned to the ground. The “Summer of the Fire” holds many meanings and lessons for me. It was literally a refiner’s fire in my life, and it blessed me with an even more sure knowledge that I am known, and that all things are in the Master’s hands.

It has been more than five years since that summer, and I was recently in Show Low on post-divorce business. I turned the music off in the car, so that I could drive in silence down the more than half-hour stretch of road that borders the charred forest. It filled me with hope to see that there is life again. There is green. Evidence of the destruction is still present, but not so glaring as it once was. I think the same is true of me. And, I like to believe that the mountain in me, will keep on springing forth with renewed life, right along with the White Mountains of Arizona, for we were burned together.

It is cold in the room. Cold enough for a light jacket, but even that doesn’t stop the shivering. The fluorescent lights are glaring off the white, peeling walls, but the light is better than the heavy darkness of the late hour. It has to be late, because she can only come to work after hours, and after her children are tucked in bed. I come along for the company, and because I’ve always wondered.

He is lying on the bed, not really needing the sheet that veils him, despite the chill of the air conditioning. He wears not a stitch of clothing underneath the sheet, but maybe at his age he is over all those suffocating inhibitions anyway. His salt-and-pepper hair is greasy and stringy, and his face, overgrown with matching facial scruff needs to be shaved. His eyes, half-opened are already deflating, and his open mouth reveals an incomplete set of yellowed teeth, still harboring bits of whatever his last meal happened to be. His overgrown fingernails are caked with black. I don’t even dare guess black what. The muted, blurred tattoo on his left arm reads "Rosie", and I wonder where she is tonight. His tag identifies him as "S. Grenger"; the tag hanging on his pruney white big toe. "S. Grenger" is dead. Here he is, lying right here in front of me. On the gurney at the mortuary where she works. Dead. On Tuesday he was probably sitting at some table in a ghetto Denny’s with other down-and-out Vietnam vets, reliving the good ol’ days, or maybe even reminiscing about Rosie. Today is Friday, and his time was up.

This is probably the weirdest thing about me, but I have always been fascinated by dead bodies. Not dead people, because I don’t believe the bodies are people. The people go on living elsewhere, but their miraculous mortal vehicles get one last spruce-up, and go the way of all the earth. I wanted to see this process.

The first time I remember seeing a dead body was at my Great-grandmother’s funeral, when I was a child. There she was, all done up, lying in her coffin, and while it looked like her, it also looked like a really good imitation, a wax figure. I wanted to touch it, but I didn’t dare. I wasn’t afraid, but I had seen enough movies of the presumed dead suddenly sitting bolt upright and opening their eyes, and I didn’t want to be the one to spark this chain of events. But I was intrigued, and waited for my next chance to see a dead body.

Fortunately for me, my life has been relatively untouched by the deaths of loved ones, but I have had more than my fair share of dead body experiences. My mother attended school to become a massage therapist. She got to go on this fantastic field trip to the College of Naturopathy, to see the dissected cadavers, as part of her training in the human body. "You gotta get me in on that!" I said, when she told me. Luckily for me, another group was scheduled to go the following week, and I was right on board. The anticipation was something else, I’ll tell you. This was my first hands-on experience with the dead, and I didn’t know how to even prepare.

Before entering the cadaver room, we were warned about the smell, and about the possibility of fainting. I was so curious, I couldn’t imagine I would have that drastic of a reaction, but it was hard to know what to expect. As the doors opened, so did my eyes. There were bodies lining both sides of the room, all male, and skinned, except for their finger tips, ears, and genitalia. Many of them had been further dissected for study. We walked from body to body, identifying muscles, bones, and organs, and sometimes looking for clues pertaining to death. Most of the cadavers had been homeless men, and their livers and lungs witnessed of hard lives and substance abuse. One body had the top of its skull sawed off, and hinged back on, so it was like a human puzzle. Open the skull, take out the brain. Hold a human brain. Wow. A human brain! Everything that man had seen, felt, heard, and experienced had been stored right in that firm, rubbery mass of tissue. I took an eye out of socket and gently pulled the attached muscles that opened and closed the eyelid. Miraculous! What had this eye seen? We saw lung cancer, and cirrhosis of the liver, and plaque in the arteries, and more. We stayed for a few hours, and I couldn’t get enough.

When my mortician friend asked if I’d like to accompany her, late one night, to the mortuary, I didn’t even hesitate. Creepy drive down the darkened freeway, during a windstorm aside, I was ready. We pull up to the locked gates of the mortuary, and she gets out to enter her code on the keypad. We park around back, by the entrance that only the morticians use. It’s the same door she sometimes has to wheel badly decomposing bodies through to hose out the maggots before embalming.

The hallway is long and dark, and lined with coffins, empty coffins newly arrived from manufacturers and protected with foam padding and shrink-wrap. The light switch is at the end of the hall, and around the corner. My heart is beating, but I feign perfect ease.

Dead bodies are kept in refrigeration units. Giant ones, like the walk-in-closet you wish you had. I gulp as she opens the door to the freezer. To my left and to my right are bunk bed type structures, with bodies on each level. Then across the floor between the ‘beds’ are gurneys with more bodies. With no pun intended, it is an out-of-body moment for me, while I gather my senses to the scene before me. Two bodies are assigned this night. The first is "S. Grenger", and the second is an overweight female body which has been autopsied, and is now zipped up in a clear vinyl bag, which is pooling with draining bodily juices.

For the next several hours, I watch as bodies and hair are scrubbed down and washed; thick, congealed blood is pumped from the bodies as formaldehyde is pumped in; eyes and mouths are sewn closed; body cavities are drained and embalmed; a face is shaved; and fingernails are trimmed and cleaned. Even lotion is thoughtfully applied and rubbed in. The autopsied body has a longer process to go through. At one point, it lies like a turkey carcass on the embalming table, its two flaps of skin opened to the sides, exposing an empty body cavity and spinal column. The sawed-off ribs are sitting on one counter, next to the top of its skull, and the organs are in a bucket on the floor. It is hosed out before being repacked with internal organs and embalming powder. The skin of the scalp is draped backwards over the face, but all is tenderly reassembled and reconstructed with such care that no closed-casket will be necessary. It is incredible to watch, and I am aware of the beautiful service that is being provided, this last gift given to these mortal bodies, that while living were loved, and who now are mourned. The white, wax-like bodies have seemingly come to life as they have thawed to room temperature and have gained the healthy color that comes from the pink tint of the formaldehyde that now plumps their veins. They are clean and groomed, and sewn back up. Once dressed, no one will be the wiser as to the process that prepared them for this state. They are dressed in their best, and wheeled to the other side of the room, awaiting their final resting spot. No refrigeration is needed after the embalming process.

This does not scare me. None of it. The radio is playing Lionel Richie and I sing along, not affected by the fact that my audience consists of my friend and about six embalmed bodies. I am not fazed or frightened. Not even when the drain in the floor backs up and blood and bodily fluids start creeping towards my feet. Not even when the arm of one of the bodies, propped up on the exposed rib cage, suddenly slips off and falls over the side of the table, dangling life-like. There is this morbid fascination and curiosity that keeps my attention at its peak. I ask every bold question that I have, and am intoxicated by the answers. I don’t want any walls here; I want all the information. And so it can not be kept from me: The one thing that chills me to the bone and haunts my mind and dreams.

In the freezer, on the third bunk up on the left-hand side, is a small bundle wrapped in a hand-woven Mexican blanket. I have to know. I ask. The blanket is pulled back, and there lies the small, peaceful body of a baby boy with long, feathery eyelashes resting on his broad, high-boned chubby cheeks. He has a yellow haze to his brown skin, but otherwise, he looks like someone’s sweet little man, maybe around six months of age. I have a baby the same age sleeping in his crib at home. This isn’t fair. I can’t hold back the tears that fill my eyes. Apparently, he had been waiting for a liver transplant, but a match could not be found in time. Sweet baby boy. How unfair that a mother has empty arms tonight. How terrifying that life can be so cruel at times, that even little ones can be snatched from its grasp. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not terrifying for the little souls called home; it’s gut-wrenchingly agonizing for the parents left behind.

There is something noble about the elderly bodies that take their turn on the table of the mortuary. They wear marks of life: stretch marks from long-ago pregnancies; laugh lines and wisdom creases; tattoos from the war; scars from reckless masculinity; liver spots from work and play in the sun; crippled hands with arthritis borne from years of overuse. I hold a hand; it is so motherly. I imagine the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches it has made, the dishes it has washed, the floors it has swept, the babies it has held. This body has lived a life. But the little one-- he never even got to crawl, or walk, or fall down. A blessing for him, I suppose. A frightful reminder for me, to hold my own a little closer, a little tighter, and not for one single second unaware.

To me, the most unimaginable horror is that I pull down that hand-woven Mexican blanket and see the face of one of my babies, lying there perfect in every way, still and cold. Every freckle and untamed cowlick; little boy knuckles never calloused with the hard work of a man; little girl lips never kissed by the true love of her dreams; eyes closed forever, withholding the life force that lights up hearts and rooms; the babies that grew in my womb, drank desperately from my breast, strengthened my arms and my back, but nearly broke my heart with love that cannot be contained. It would be too painful to endure: me in the warmth of home, collapsed in the bed where he slept, gathering up blankets around my face in a frantic attempt to breathe in his boy-ness, while my child’s sweet softness lies in a freezer. I cannot even imagine my arms giving him up, unlocking the maternal rigor mortis that holds fast the body grown within my own. I would beg to decompose along with him. How is it fair that the dead at least get the preservation of formaldehyde? Pump something into the veins of the grieving parents so that they might look alive! Their color is gone!

May my children never beat me to the embalming table. Please, God.

I come home after midnight, emotionally exhausted. I have seen the stuff of horror films and crime novels, but the only image keeping me from sleep is the still face of the baby boy. My thoughts are of a mother and father blaming a God whose works seem cruel and indifferent. I must check each of my sleeping children: kiss their faces and check for warmth; rest my hand on their backs and check for breath; whisper ‘I love you’ and watch for stirring. And then I kneel to pray that each of them is given the privilege of living enough life to earn laugh lines, stretch marks, and even scars. Let them read every book, sing every song, cook amazing food and share it with hosts of friends, write something powerful, travel to faraway lands, change the world, fall in love, and even suffer heartache. And may I never have to mother them through death’s dark veil.

(*one more note, while this is a true account, names and a few details were changed to protect the living, and the dead.)

I didn't go on a single date for three years after my first marriage ended. I had been with Adam since I was seventeen, and after 13 years together we fit like a glove, and I could barely imagine life on my own, let alone life with another man. How in the world do you start over? How do go over all the crazy family stories again? Much of my heart remained in denial that adultery, divorce, or single motherhood could possibly happen to me. I believed it to be some weird blip in my life that would eventually right itself. I focused all of my faith on that goal.

They were very spiritual years for me, years of tremendous stretching and growth. God became even more real, and I hung on his every manifestation in my aching heart. I believed that God wanted my family to continue, and that he loved both Adam and me enough to offer us open doors for redemption in our love, but ultimately allow us to choose our own paths, with commensurate rewards. I certainly hoped that Adam would choose my path. But he didn't. Well, he would turn for a time, but then spin right back around. It was confusing and tumultuous. I began to date to bide my time, but I still held out hope that my miracle would come.

It did. I signed on to some internet dating sites. They were LDS, so I felt they were somewhat safer, and the attention was intoxicating! One day in May (May 13th, actually, a Friday, coincidentally) I sat at my computer when a message came to my inbox at ldslinkup.com. "Wow. You're really pretty," it read. I felt I needed at least to be gracious and say 'thank you', and see who had passed my way, so I clicked on his profile. Hmmmm. Kind of intriguing. Mysterious. Depth in his eyes. Divorced. Father of 2. Green eyes. 5'4. Yikes. I'm 5'4, and I've never had to worry about dating a short guy. My first husband was 6'4, and all the males in my family are over 6'. I've shot down guys before simply because of their height, shallow thing that I am. But something said to write him back.

me: "Thanks! You just made my day!"
him: "Well, now that I've got you talking to me, what's your name?"
me: "Jenna"
him: "Nice name, Jenna. I'm Adam."

(gulp)
Adam? Seriously? The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

me: "That's my ex's name."
him: "Oh, crap."

It was okay, not a turn-off. I loved his voice, and how interested he seemed in me, and so we kept on talking. And talking. And talking. And then I could hear my children's alarm clocks going off in their bedrooms to wake them up for school. Birds were chirping. We had talked all night long. We didn't much get off the phone at all for weeks. Every battery in our cordless phones died. Our elbows became arthritic from holding the phone up to our ears. It didn't matter because we couldn't get enough. The more we talked, the more I liked. He had almost identical crazy family stories to mine (but if there was a winner, the prize would have to go to him). We had very similar upbringings: tons of dirty kids in a large, poor, Mormon family, except I'm the oldest, and he's right smack in the middle. We both knew what "Deseret beef stew" is, and our families share many of the same dysfunctions. I can remember one night we were on the phone (he in CA, me in UT), both tuned into the same television channel. There was a commercial for a National Geographic special or something and suddenly a graphic scene of a wildebeast being torn apart by hungry lions came on the screen. Adam said, "That's what it was like when Mom brought home a box of sugar cereal." I busted up in laughter. That's exactly what it was like. 'Sugar' cereal, he said. This guy knows.

We met after two weeks of phone conversation. I picked him up at the Salt Lake Airport, with nerves that rattled. He was sweating it too, but for different reasons. He had lied about being 5'4, and was only 5'3. He was scared to death that I'd find him out. Which I did. It was the very first thing I said to him. "You're not 5'4," I said as I hugged him. "Yeah, I am," he said, "it's just that your eyes are placed higher on your head so it looks like I'm shorter." He really thought he could get me with that. The height thing was weird in the beginning, though I loved how confident he was with himself. He told me early in our conversations that he felt like he "towered above the masses". But it felt odd to walk next to a man the same size as me. Every time I turned my head to say something, his eyes were right there. Whoa! Scared me! I was used to feeling little next to a man, maybe even cowering a bit. I talked with my dad about my feelings.

"Dad, I think I'm falling in love with him," I said. "I know it's quick, but there's something different about this one. I knew it almost immediately." My dad was glowing with happiness on the other end of the phone, I could feel it. "But I can't get over this height thing. It's so hard to get used to." The first thing my dad said to me was, "Well, how tall is his spirit?" And then what he said took my breath away. He said, "Jenna, look what's happened to you over the last several years. You've been emancipated! You no longer have to stand low, looking up to a man, you can look him straight in the eye." I started to cry. It was true. I deserved equal love and partnership, and the Lord sent me a man I could look eye to eye.

We were married less than two months later. It was a quaint, lovely, outdoor ceremony in the mountains of Utah. Our children, family, and close friends were there. We exchanged vows we had written ourselves and I thanked him for being worthy of my heart and the pain that had consecrated it. He was my Adam, the Adam I had waited for. It hasn't been an easy road by any stretch of the imagination, but when I consider the alternative...it's been worth it.