Last week my sister Laura texted wondering if she could drop off two of her kids while she helped out a family member who was in the hospital. I told her that would be fine–eager that she’d taken me up an offer I’d made earlier that day to babysit.
Actually, I was probably over eager. I’m always trying to figure out ways to help relieve the pressure valve of her life. And I’m constantly coming up short. Here at last was something I could do for her. The bonus, of course, was time with my nephews and the chance to surprise the girls at school pickup with cousins. I convinced her to let me keep them overnight (she lives more than an hour away) and told her to pack their swimsuits- figuring they’d enjoy a dip in the pool while the girls went to swim practice.
She arrived with Emmet and Henry shortly before I needed to pick up the girls from school. It was a blur of conversation before she got on the road and then the boys, Annie and I hopped in the van and headed for school.
As we waited outside, I noticed that 7-year-old Henry looked a little listless. I attributed it to standing around in the heat waiting for school to let out. He mentioned wanting a big glass of ice water when we got back to the house. The girls finally met up with us- all excited shrieks and cheering. As we headed back to the car, Hen mentioned he just wanted to lie on the couch and drink some cold water, which seemed a little weird because normally when the cousins gather there is very little lying around and usually lots of noise.
At home, Emmet and the girls ran off to discuss Pokemon and Henry flopped on the couch with his ice water. His forehead felt warm, so I decided to take his temperature. Jovie held the thermometer in his mouth for him, which was pretty darn cute. When it beeped, I took a look. 101.1. I asked him if he wanted some Tylenol. He told me he hated medicine and that it would make him throw up.
Laura had mentioned before she left that he had seemed a little out of it earlier in the day, but didn’t have any symptoms to speak of. With her crew, there’s always something going around.
I texted to let her know Hen had a fever, asking if I could give him medicine. She told me she was coming back. Hen wouldn’t take medicine. And, anyway, she wouldn’t get to where she needed to be until it was too late to do what she’d wanted to do.
I tried to do triage. I told her I could manage Henry and keep him comfortable. That she could still do what she needed to do. I so badly wanted to help because so often I’m of no help.
But she insisted. I told the boys. As expected, both were upset with the news. Right away, Henry claimed he was feeling better.
An hour or so later, Laura arrived. The kids were beyond disappointed.
Parting is such sweet sorrow. Though in this case, the sorrow involved loud protests and refusals to get into vehicles and general angst and anger.
The rest of the day I felt agitated. Just like the kids. The disappointment and frustration buzzing under my skin. I just wanted to help. Do one small thing to make her life a little easier. And I felt as if I had only not helped, but also made life more difficult for her. All that driving she’d done and a trip home in rush hour with a car full of angry, tired kids.
It didn’t feel good.
Laura told me the whole enterprise was the result of her poor planning– wanting to do more than she could realistically do in a day.
“It was a gift of grace from God, Sue, it was,” she texted me.
But it didn’t feel like grace.
A day or two after seeing my sister, I was listening to an episode of Fresh Air. Terry Gross was interviewing Barbara Brown Taylor, who was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church and who worked as a minister before moving on to become a professor of religion at Piedmont College in Georgia. Taylor is the author of several books including her memoir “Holy Envy: Finding God In The Faith Of Others.”
During the interview, Gross asked Taylor what she meant by the word “God”- and her response stuck with me:
“When I use the word God, I am so aware I’m using a code word and that everyone who hears that word and probably everyone who uses it imagines something different, imagines a different posture in front of that being, that presence. I suppose my own image, my own idea of God, as imperfect and as evolving as it is, right now would be the glue that hooks everything together, the consciousness that moves between all living things.
When I use the word God, I do not envision a large person with two arms, two legs and nose and two eyes. I envision, instead, some presence so beyond my being, a presence that both knows the stars by name and knows me by name, as well, that is not here to be useful to me, that is not here to give me things as much as to ask me to give myself away for love. I, of course, get a great deal of what I mean by God from the tradition in which I stand – the Christian tradition, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. But when I say I believe in God, I mean I trust. I trust in the goodness of life, of being. I trust that beyond all reason. I trust that with my life. And that’s what I mean by God.”
The whole description is really lovely and I think inches closer to my idea of the greater power, the universal web we’re all woven into, the Big Bang of our existence- the god or God of it all. The older I get, the more I find that the great joy of being alive in this place as a human is the inching closer to the meaning. The witnessing and unearthing of it in my life every day.
One part in particular especially stuck out to me that day: When she speaks of a presence “that is not here to be useful to me, that is not here to give me things as much as to ask me to give myself away for love.”
To ask me to give myself away for love.
I swished that phrase around in my brain. Then turned it into a question:
“How am I being called to love?”
I was still agitated about the previous day– the stuff with Laura and the boys.
Annie was down for a nap so I decided maybe I’d use the time to meditate. I don’t have any sort of meditation practice to speak of. It had been months since I’d last given into the silence of a moment. But that day, it felt like the thing I needed to do. I sat down on my bedroom floor for a minute and took a deep breath. And another. I shifted my body. And I didn’t feel quite right. Then I heard the birds singing outside and felt the sun on my shoulder. “Outside,” I thought. “I’ll go outside.”
So I did. I grabbed a blanket and sat down on it in the shade of magnolia in my backyard.
Normally, when I sit down to meditate, I just sort of follow my breathing as best I can. Which sounds straight forward but ends up being not so straight forward when all the random voices decide to pop in for a visit. Which is actually never a small matter.
But that day, for whatever reason, I was feeling a bit fancy. Instead of just focusing on my breathing I repeated the question I’d written down:
“How am I being called to love?”
I Sat down. Closed my eyes. Started with the breathing. Then focused on that question, repeating it like a mantra.
“How am I being called to love?”
And right on cue, the cast of anxious, bored and bickering children arrived.
The one reminding me to add “deodorant” to the shopping list. The one that asked if I ever told the swim coaches which meets the kids would be missing. The other one that wished the air conditioner weren’t so loud because it was totally harshing my zen and the fourth voice that chided if I were really zen I wouldn’t let the air conditioner be harshing my anything, I would just accept its presence and move on. And the fifth voice that jumped in like a self-righteous librarian and reminded me that this whole conversation about noisy air conditioners and real or made-up ideas about the concept of zen was defeating the entire purpose of me sitting out in the back yard in the first place.
I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about meditation. But I do know you’re not supposed to pass judgment on your practice or categorize it as “good” or “bad.” It just is.
But my “I have to get an ‘A’ on my spelling test!” roots go deep. So I was sitting out there feeling like a pretty terrible meditator.
But whether I was good at it or not, I was still sitting out there. And that was the point. To be sitting there with the noisy air conditioner and the noisy birds and the breeze rattling the leaves and the wind chimes. And, of course, the cacophony of little voices all of my own creation.
I sat. And breathed. And I asked the question. And when the index finger on my right hand suddenly began to itch, I stayed still and didn’t scratch it. And when a gnat whizzed by my left temple, I stayed still and didn’t swat it. I observed the minor discomforts and let them pass.
The air conditioner turned off and it seemed that the sound had been vacuumed out for a second until I heard a siren in the distance and cars whirring passed. And I realized the white noise of one type of machinery was only being replaced by all the other noises. There was always noise.
There will always be noise.
I focused on the question, “How am I called to love?” turning it over and over in my head.
And then, and I know this will sound weird, it was as if each of the words were leaves blown off a tree branch one by one. I couldn’t remember my question. I could only remember the last leaf clinging to stem: How.
How?
I found myself becoming frustrated that I couldn’t remember the rest of the question. But I had to let that go, too.
So I stayed with what was in front of me:
How?
How?
How?
And the answer that materialized from that place of consciousness I don’t at all understand was equally as vague:
This.
Again I asked, “How?”
And again the answer was simply, “This.”
This.
This.
This.
To pose such a big question and to receive such a small answer is infuriating. I found myself both judging the question and the answer. Repeating “How” in tones pleading, angry and desperate.
This was the response. As insistent and steady as a heart beat. This. This. This.
What “This” is? I suppose that’s the topic for another post. Or another 30 posts. The question of our life here in this time and place in space.
That day, I took “This” to mean just what I was doing. Quieting my brain. Being present in the moment. Sinking into the nature around me not just as an observer, but as a participant. Just being.
But who knows is “This” is always the answer to “How”? The ever-pragmatic part of my brain sighs and rolls its eyes. “What are you going to do? Sit under this tree forever ignoring the fact that your right index finger has a mosquito bite and the rest of your family wants to know what’s for dinner?”
I’m not sure how “This” looks as a long-term plan.
How I put inaction into action, so to speak.
But maybe I found another possible breadcrumb in a book the girls and I are reading– “Because of Winn-Dixie” by Kate DiCamillo.
In one chapter the protagonist, Opal, follows her dog Winn-Dixie into the yard of an old woman other kids in town say is a witch. As it turns out, Gloria Dump is not a witch but a kindly, misunderstood gardener.
“You know, my eyes ain’t too good at all,” Gloria Dump tells Opal. “I can’t see nothing but the general shape of things, so I got to rely on my heart. Why don’t you go on and tell me everything about yourself, so I can see you with my heart.”
Blind or note, I think most people struggle to see more than just the general shape of things literally and metaphorically– myself included. Yet we rely so much on our eyes to tell us the story or a person or a place or a situation.
Maybe “This” isn’t just about being present, but also doing what Gloria does for Opal. Listening to another person’s story to see them with your heart.
And that’s something I can do always.
It occurred to me while re-reading all this that both Laura and I were trying to accomplish the same goal last week: Being present for someone we loved. But our desire to show up blinded us to obvious barriers: traffic, sick kids and the time of day.
In wanting to be present, we weren’t present.
And maybe that’s what gets in our way in our way with trying to find peace in for ourselves and each other.
Laura, as usual, was right. That ill-conceived visit was a gift. “This” was grace.
