#adventnotebook2023

Guardian Angel

“Hey ma’am,” I said. “How’re you doin’ this mornin’?”

The old woman sat on a bench in the early morning sun.

She was barefooted.

The soles of her feet were calloused and her gnarled toes were bent in many different directions.

She wore a simple sun dress.

Her skinny arms and legs were like the slats on the back of the bench.

Her elbows and knees were wrinkled and knobby like the branches on a tree, maybe like the tree from which the bench was made.

Her hands were calloused like her feet, and her knuckles were like stones in the ground.

Her face was shaped like the moon and her gray hair was pulled back and tied into a pony tail.

Her weathered skin was worn like the leather on a friendly pair of shoes.

Her eyes were as deep as the earth and as brown as soil in a gentle rain.

She was beautiful.

“Hey yourself,” she answered. “I’m doin’ real good. Want to sit here?”

I sat beside her.

She reached out, tenderly ran her thumb across my forehead, and laid her hand on my head.

She leaned over to me and gave me a light kiss on my cheek.

“I’m a guardian angel,” she whispered. “I’m your guardian angel. Here for you as you’re here for others. Here for you.”

A slight breeze blew through the yellow leaves of the maple tree beside us.

We sat silently.

I smiled.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2023

One thing I do every day is listen carefully for beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary and courage in the human.

I learned to do this at the old Greenville Memorial Hospital.

I worked as a patient transporter there between college and graduate school.

During my break time, I would go up the elevator to the NICU on the top floor of the building.

There, there was a rocking chair and a tiny baby named Gabby.

The kind nurses on the unit let me gown up and hold Gabby in my arms and rock her in the chair until my half hour of break time was up.

She was born deaf and blind and had been in the hospital for a long time.

She needed someone to hold her, hold her so closely she could feel the vibrations of a loving heart.

I was that guy.

I wonder where she is now.

I wonder if she knows that in her deafness and blindness she taught me to hear and see.

I wonder if she knows that the vibrations of her heart changed me.

I wonder.

Thank you Gabby.

I am because you are.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2023

If you know Northern Ireland then you know of the Troubles, the times and the ways religion, nationalism and political ideology pulled people apart and broke them to pieces.

Corrymeela seeks to put those who have been pulled apart back together, and seeks to make peace between those broken to pieces.

One of the members of Corrymeela, poet PadraigÔ Tuama, has become one of my favorite writers.

In his astonishing, beautiful book of poems Sorry For Your Troubles, you'll find these words in the small, lyrical essay "Bury the Hatchet" -

The folks at Corrymeela have long believed that human encounter between people who believe and think different things can have a transformative effect.

Transformative because it is more courageous to have an argument with a person in a room than never entering that room in the first place.

Transformative because when you can be in a place of beauty it might be that your mind can be open to new and creative possibilities, and because to lighten the shadow of our land, we must all speak of our own shadows.

Transformative because when you have an ethic that challenges scapegoating, you may be able to open up a way of reflecting on your own shortcomings.

Transformative because they believe in the power of the shared table and the poured cup of tea.

How we need to be this and do this in our here and now.

Padraig’s words inspired this small story from me.

Small Story:

She held his hand.

'For someone so small and frail, he has big, strong hands,' she thought as her fingers intertwined with his fingers.

When you're a migrant kid, and you spend your life picking peaches and tomatoes in the hot sun of humid days, your hands grow like the fruits and vegetables of spring and summer, but the rest of you withers away like vines of winter and fall.

He squeezed her hand, and she could feel the beating of his heart in her hand, and she felt it deeply inside of her, and she turned and looked into his eyes.

'I understand,' she whispered, and he could feel tenderness deeply inside of him, as he looked into her deep brown eyes.

When you're an indigenous kid in the Arctic, and you spend your life building and mending under the small sun of frozen days, your heart grows beautiful and mysterious, like the great bowhead whales under the ice, but the rest of you bends against the harsh, bitter winds of the ocean.

They both turned again and looked out over the water at the setting sun.

Tears welled up in the corners of their eyes and dropped down their cold cheeks into the icy Chukchi Sea.

And they knew human kindness, and felt the warm tears of love.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2023

Dear Public Schools,

I love you.

I know you don’t hear those words enough, so I wanted to tell you today.

I love you for who you are.

Malala Yousafzai said, “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.”

You are a place where people who look different and think different and act different and believe different can come together every day to be together and learn together and learn to be together.

Thank you.

I love you for what you do.

Albert Einstein said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

You do not judge the fish by its ability to climb a tree. You take students where they are and help them become all they hope to be. Many times, you take them where they are and help them find hope itself.

Thank you.

I love you because you gave me Lenyel.

He and his mamí fled to the mainland of the United States from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed their home and devastated their lives in summer 2017.

When he walked through the door of my classroom and into my life this year, I quickly learned that strong winds, hard rains and churning waters were still swirling around inside of him.

I tried to reach him, to board myself up against the wind, rain and flood until the storm passed and I could teach him the writing, reading, science and life skills that can help him become all he can be in and for the world.

But every day, he would come into the classroom with eyes afire with anger or quenched from depression and I did not know what to do.

One day, my co-teacher asked, “Could we do a reader’s theater about the Declaration of Independence?”

I answered, “Of course!”

Lenyel got a part in the play.

He loved it! He spoke out with so much enthusiasm and animation; his classmates cheered for him.

He raised his hands and head to the sky and shouted, “I love this school!”

Thank you for giving him to me.

I love you because you gave me Naomi.

She and her family fled to the United States from violence and poverty in Honduras.

When she walked through the door of my classroom and into my life (after the school year had begun), she could not speak a word of English or understand a thing I said.

Every morning, she and my four other Spanish speakers read poems with me from a bilingual book of poems about a boy who comes to the United States from Mexico.

They practice their English and I practice my Spanish, and we are learning to communicate with each other just fine.

One day, the whole class and I brought our lunches to the classroom to watch a story on our Promethean Board while we ate.

I stood behind my desk with my tray in my hand and noticed that my chair was across the room where I had left it after our morning read-aloud.

“Oh well,” I smiled and sighed to myself. “I’ll just stand and eat. A teacher’s life on teacher’s feet is the teaching life for me.”

Before I could raise my fork from my tray to my mouth, I felt a tug on my side.

I looked down.

There was Naomi with her chair, making a sweeping motion with her hand and smiling a kind smile with her eyes to show me she wanted to give me her chair to sit down in and rest.

Thank you for giving her to me.

I love you because you gave me Jayden.

He came to our school at the end of last year – the sixth school he had attended in the past two years.

His schoolwork and his behavior reflected the chaos of his life, but we provided order to his days.

We talked and taught and taught and talked with him about doing the best work he could do and being the best person he could be, and he started heading in the right direction.

I have a picture of him running along the bases of Fluor Field, the baseball field of our minor league team here in Greenville, South Carolina, with his head up, a giant smile on his face, and the words “Live Fearlessly” on the fence behind him. It reminds me that he is headed in the right direction.

I was helping him create a graphic organizer in his writing notebook.

We drew a giant heart on a page.

“Write some things you love around the outline of the heart,” I said. “So you can always remember things you can write about.”

The first words he wrote were “Berea Elementary School” and “my 4th grade teachers.”

Thank you for giving him to me.

Where else could I do my part in changing the life of a child, in changing the life of the world, if not in your classrooms?

Where else could my own heart grow bigger and my own mind grow broader if not in your classrooms?

Thank you.

I love you.

So much.

Your friend and fellow teacher.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2023

My shoes thumped the city sidewalk.

They pounded out a runner’s rhythm as I made my way from one block to the next.

I was close enough to the end of my 5K run and far enough from the Charlotte Ballet building where Zeke was dancing to slow down to a steady walk and allow my racing heartbeat to become a resting heartbeat before I reached my day’s finish line.

Along my route, I passed poems on the brick walls of inner-city buildings.

One of the poems was by Dan Albergotti, who is a teacher and the Dean of the English Department at Coastal Carolina University.

It was titled “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.’

Since I love whales, and am trying to become a whale genius, I stopped to read the poem.

Measure the walls. Count the ribs.

Notch the long days. Look up for

blue sky through the spout. Make

small fires with the broken hulls of

fishing boats. Practice smoke

signals. Call old friends, and listen

for echoes of distant voices.

Organize your calendar. Dream of

the beach. Look each way for the

dim glow of light. Work on your

reports. Review each of your life’s

ten million choices. Endure moments

of self loathing. Find the evidence of

those before you. Destroy it. Try to be

very quiet, and listen for the sound of

gears and moving water. Listen for the

sound of your heart. Be thankful that

you are here, swallowed with all hope,

where you can rest and wait. Be

nostalgic. Think of all the things you

did and could have done. Remember

treading water in the center of the

still night sea, your toes pointing again

and again down, down into the black

depths.

It’s about listening, learning and living in a world full of talking, ignoring and dying.

It’s beautifuI.

I was thinking about it as the Charlotte Ballet came into sight.

I looked down to my right hand side and saw a styrofoam bowl of soup.

It was filled with rain water from the morning showers.

Little bits of shredded meat, sliced carrots and baby potatoes were floating at its rim.

It was sitting on a three block high green painted concrete wall that ran along the side of the sidewalk.

I looked down to my left hand side and saw a small loaf of Italian bread.

It was laying on its side in a muddy puddle in a pothole in the street.

It was split in the middle with tiny crumbs all around it.

“Soup and bread,” I thought.

“The simplest elements. The simplest meal. A meal, simply. A simple meal, elementally.”

I looked up.

An old couple was in front of me, sitting hand in hand on the wall, looking at me with kind eyes the color of smooth, brown stones and kind smiles the color of the sun shining out through the broken clouds.

“How you doin’ today?” they asked.

“I’m doin’ good,” I answered. “Real good. How ‘bout you?”

“We’re doin’ real good, too. Hope you have a nice day.”

“You, too.”

“People and words,” I thought. The simplest elements. The simplest kindness. Being kind, simply. Simple kindness, elementally.

I passed by the Charlotte Public Library.

The librarians have placed signs on support columns with quotes on them from some of the greatest writers in the world.

One of the signs stopped me mid stride and brought me back to it.

“A word is worth a thousand pictures,” wrote Elie Wiesel.

Poetry.

Beauty.

Elements.

Soup.

Bread.

Human beings.

Kindness.

Words.

Yes.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2023

During my junior year in college, I spent spring break in Washington, D.C.

One night, I went out with a group of people to provide soup, sandwiches and hot chocolate to homeless folks around the capital.

We rode around in an old bakery truck, stopped in designated spots and set up two stations, one for the food and one for the drink.

At one of the stops, I worked the hot drink station.

There was a long line of people in front of me.

The night was bitterly, unbearably cold and the wind off the Potomac River cut through my coveralls and chilled me to my bones.

My eyes glazed over from the crowd and the cold, and though I said, “God bless you,” and, “Go in peace,” with every cup of hot chocolate I gave to every person who held out hands to me I stopped seeing the tired, sad eyes and grizzled faces of the people in front of me and started thinking about the gentle warmth of the heater in the truck and in my room back home.

I felt a tug on my arm.

I looked down and the face of a little girl came into focus.

She was so slight and thin I would have missed her, would not have seen her, were it not for the tugging.

She put her little hand into my hand.

In that moment our hands formed a small, open space between us.

“Excuse me,” she whispered, so softly I could barely hear her, would not have heard her, were it not for careful listening.

“Could you give some hot chocolate for my mom?”

Her mom was sick at home, she told me.

This small one did a big thing and came out into the cold and braved the crowds to find something for her mom to eat and drink.

I made a little package of food and drink, put it in her hands, and sent her on her way.

“You’re a kind, wonderful person,” I whispered to her, “And your mom is lucky to have you.”

She walked away into the mass of people and disappeared.

I would never have seen her, would never have heard her, would never have been moved by her kindness, had she not reached out for my hand, had she not created the small, open space between us.

Here is a poem.

I wrote it in Fibonacci form, and I write most of my poems in the rhythm of the Fibonacci sequence.

I love the shape of the graphed numbers of the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21...), a swirl you can find in a conch shell by the sea, a pine cone in the woods, a sunflower, a Thelonius Monk song, and many other places in nature and art.

A swirl you can find in the heart and life of that little girl on that cold night in Washington D.C.

I hope we can find and nurture the small space between us.

Small Space

We

stood

closely,

side by side.

She reached out for me

and took my hand inside of hers.

Our fingers intertwined and our palms made a small space.

This space was warm in the midst of the deep snow that covered the frozen ground of Point Hope,

was warm against the icy wind that blew off the rocking waters of the Chukchi Sea.

“Life is in these small spaces between us,” she whispered.

We stood quietly hand in hand

with the small space, and

then we smiled

holding

small

space.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2023

Christmas Card from a Shepherd

Dear N’na and N’baba,

You wouldn’t believe what happened to me tonight if you didn’t love me. But you do love me so I know you’ll believe me, and I know your mouth and your eyes and your ears and your heart will be as wide open as mine when I tell you.

The evening was like any other evening for a poor, lonely, ten year old shepherd like me. Momadu, the shepherd on the hill next to mine, brought his sheep by me on the way back from the stream below us. His first sheep had a sticker on it’s bump that said, “Sheep Happens,” and when Momadu passed by he threw up his hands and smiled and said, “We’re in deep sheep,” so that made me laugh. There’s nothing like good sheep humor to lighten a shepherd’s heart.

I led my own flock down to the water. Small clouds of dust rose from the dry, hard, ground as we made our way down the hill. My bare feet stepped over the stony field, calloused from a young life of playing, working and living without shoes.

My sheep seemed to be growing out of the ground, their feet deeply rooted in the dirt.

“The Lord God formed life from the dust of the ground,” teaches Holy writ.

I understand.

When we returned to the top of our hill, and I laid the sheep down to sleep in the green pastures for the night, the thing that has changed my life, the thing that will change your life, the thing that will change life itself, happened.

An angel of the Lord stood before me, me a lowly shepherd, and the glory of the Lord shone around me, and I was terrified. But the angel said to me, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

When the angels left me, I ran to Momadu and shouted, “Did you see what I saw? Did you hear what I heard?” He did. “Let’s go now to Bethlehem,” I continued, “And see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

We went quickly and found Mary and Joseph.

The child was lying in a manger.

Mary and Joseph looked at us. We were standing outside of the stable. Our clothes were tattered and torn, our feet were bare and dirty, and we smelled like sheep. I expected them to ask us to leave. But they surprised us. “Come here,” they whispered. They put their arms around our shoulders. “Welcome,” they whispered.

Mary picked up the baby and put him in my arms. “This is Jesus,” she said.

He looked up at me. His brown eyes were the same color as my eyes, his brown skin was the same color as my skin, his tattered clothes were as holey as my clothes. I sleep on the hay, too.

I held him close and felt his little heartbeat on my chest. I kissed his forehead with a gentle kiss. He smiled at me, and my life was changed forever.

“Thank you,” I said to Mary and Joseph.

“You’re welcome,” they said. They kissed Momadu and I on our foreheads with gentle kisses and sent us on our way.

We told everybody about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what we told them!

But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. We returned, glorifying and praising God for all we had heard and seen, as it had been told us.

Now I’m telling it to you!

N’na and N’baba, I think I know what God is telling us. We’re the smallest and most forgotten people in the world, and God, in this little baby, has remembered us! God is with us. The world sees us as chancers and scroungers, layabouts and loungers. Us...the unseen ones. Us...the unloved ones. Us...the lonely ones. But God...God sees us. God...God loves us. God...God is with us!

As you lay your heads down on your mats tonight, and sleep comes softly over you like a wool blanket, please know that I am

Your Bala

God’s shepherd

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2023