Life forever invites us to grow into new challenges, new adventures, new opportunities to learn and to serve.
What is your growing edge?
Parker Palmer/Carrie Newcomer
Look well to the growing edge!
Howard Thurman
I am here and it is as expected. Though, this suggests expectations, and I had only one; to write. A big one actually; to write ‘the’ book. I have not really begun, so I guess, in this way, it is not going as expected.
To give myself grace, I have been here only 17 hours; 8 of them sleeping.
I have made my way through my scraps of paper and notes; nearly illegible. I have tossed some and kept others for further reflection.
I’ve attended three of the now six liturgy of the hour that have occurred since my arrival.
I walked to the top of the statue hill, and out beyond the cow pasture where I believe Merton’s hermitage once was. I tell myself this anyway, based on some of his descriptions in journals, and the lay of the land now. I wish it were still there, preserved and visitable. I wonder to myself what it would’ve been like to know him when alive. Would I have felt such tender reverence were he flesh and blood in my lifetime? I suspect not. Flesh and blood, after all contain ego and character, and these are usually not to be wondered at as much as tolerated and accepted. Whenever I think on things this way-people from the past whom I admire and recall or reflect on with a bit of reverence-I realize I am doing so to a degree, to find my way to my own way of being revered and recalled with wonder and appreciation, when the future looks back at me.
In seeing the truth for myself of how I revere, and with what caution of reality I can more honestly attribute the revery, it lightens my own sense of obligation to produce or perform or output worthwhile content in any particular way. If I can, after all, see a somewhat heroic figure such as Thomas Merton is to me, with grace of imperfection and still hold him in revery of example and light, then I too can have misguided edges and soft spots that don’t always mark up true.
There is always room for alignment and adjustment; as long as I am alive that is. Once gone, as Merton is, the alignments and adjustments become the property of the readers, viewers, and revery-makers of my life there, then. I hope they do so with grace and tenderness, as I do Merton. He is a hero of living and an example of gentle grace and the desperate search of one human to do their best and therein be their best, but I can see too he was just that; human. No higher or brighter than you or I. Which as I see it leaves a whole lot of room to turn my light on into the world, and not worry where it shines or how far it’s illumination spans.
I’ve been tearing up. A few times last week from home, random occurrences I still can not explain. I thought it was because I was feeling the fading of my mother’s life, or the winter doldrums.
Now yesterday and this morning here at Gethsemani I am nearly choking on them still. Tears that come to my chest, throat, and spill into my eyes. For one as myself, so averse to dramatic shows of emotion, classifying them as inauthentic overdramatizing for cinematic effect, I’m taken aback by this uncontrollable rising.
I’ve said my sister is the dramatic one; she went into the world focused on theatrics, vocal performance, and ways in which she could stand on stage. Each life event, sometimes the smallest of incidence, can get a rise from her with more expression than I find comfortable.
This isn’t to suggest I was missing something she was seeing, it’s to point out the difference in personalities; and here, just between two.
The world contains multitudes….
Rising tears where there seems to be no reason for them causes me to go quiet. To sit alone and move alone so I do not embarrass myself for their existence, or draw attention. I don’t know how I would reply if I were asked what we would ask of someone tearing up: ‘Are you okay?’
I am getting more comfortable living with my emotions; not being so quick to quiet them away and let my sister be the dramatic one. It is about how I emote, and dig into the emoting, not whether it is a right or wrong display in my life.
I await the revelation of why they are churning in me at this time. I am not struggling to contain them so much as sitting quietly to listen to them. I am not throwing them to the world I am holding them close and letting them speak, if they choose. If they remain silent to their reason for presenting, well that will be fine with me too. I know I will see somewhere in my future, why they are here now this way.
All this to say I do not not feel; it is to say I process differently, and consider the dramatics that can sometimes come on emotion to be something quite personal; private. Where others may turn to share and remonstrate out loud, I tend anymore, to sit. To disappear. To go inside and await the time when the tidal waves pass-good or bad-and live there.
Tears do not only suggest something painful or sad after all; they can be the stirring of something much deeper than a response to external loss or change.
In this case, me here, Gethsemani, I see this. I am not sad. I don’t know if I can yet find the word or words for what I am but as best right now I sort through my vocabulary storehouse and call it awe.
The crushing, crashing, three years that have occurred since I was here last are standing at the threshold of my spirit. they show up most vibrantly right now because of this memory touch-point that is Gethsemani.
I was here three years ago to the date.
At that time I stood at the starting gate of a year of sabbatical, where I was taking myself out of the teaching routine, of the art inspiration treadmill I’d put myself on as I assigned ‘should’s and must’s and have to’s’ to myself as if the burnout I had created was a necessary track to run in order to reach my goal. But therein has lay the problem; the goal was not what it ought to be. And there I use it again; an ‘ought’; a ‘should’ when in fact that is the point; there is no ought nor should nor any must or have to. I’d been running a treadmill to my own demise, only. Not a track to my own best self.
And that anymore, three years on, is all I want.
What I do have, I see from here, is a life lived in my own unique way. Efforts both good and bad, trials and attempts, some successful others worthless. Words spoken that raised up, and caused pain. Paint spread across surface that held the light of truth, and some that lay flat in fallow nothingness.
Through it all though I can see now that I have gotten to live. Seems obvious but is it? Of course I have gotten to stay alive; none of my choices have killed me, only lay me a bit flat perhaps….
But live; provide, produce, create, express, experience; and in these, trust, believe, deepen, as well as widen. Not everyone can say this. I see examples of otherwise around me daily.
This I think, as I stand on the Brink of Everything as Parker Palmer has said, is from where and why the tears are coming. Three years seems like a long time to live in a way that felt like simply putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes treading water, sometimes clinging furiously to the edge. Covid did this not just to me. But for me, covid coming on the heels of self-selected sabbatical, spreading the fallow, rebuilding, assessing, and rejuvenating time (or would it be death time? this has been a very real question too; do I ‘die’ to it all, or do I rise again? and if I rise, can I do it real?) into a period much too long for a doing-natured soul like myself to endure, endure yet I did.
And here I am, at this landmark I have stood at before, being tossed to emotions I hadn’t seen coming yet are not surprising all the same.
Not a crossroad anymore; this is not that.
I can see, if I can see nothing else clearly, that I have made a choice. I didn’t fully realize it until I just wrote these words here now. I have made a choice.
I chose the road marked out for me to continue. Regardless of how difficult or what obstacles show up along the way, I choose to persevere on my path to reach more, teach more, inspire more. I am shocked as I type that; and not. Tears form and my chest fills with an ache, yet I know it is true. I turned away from the road marked ‘ease and mindlessness’ which would’ve been nice, thank you very much, and simple to select. I would’ve been ‘taken care of’ somehow, my body-life sustained by someone, somehow, regardless of my life engagement. Yet I could not. Over and over again these past three years I looked into the horizon of that roadway before me and thought ‘why not?!’ and always I responded ‘no way’.
Even when another choice of road seemed not to exist.
This is where I found myself sitting down in the dust and weeds along the roadway and crying into my lap. Screaming sometimes too; ask John…. Yet once I let it go, let the drama of these emotions run through me, I could wipe my eyes and low and behold, a tiny opening; a path my eyes didn’t before perceive, was there before me. So I brushed off my dusty tear covered lap and rose to take the first step into this way.
Persistence. It’s an ugly word when you have to put it into action for yourself. Yet seeing how it has been the arrow in my quiver all along, being shot not once but over and over and over toward a horizon I could not always see, has been a gift. Persistence and perseverance are allies to the soul trying to rise to its truest self.
Thankfully I am rising, I have not risen to my fullest and quite frankly I do not think any of us ever do in this one life. Like the tower of Babel that gets knocked down, we build ourselves up, thinking we have found the solution to reach the goal we have set for ourself, only to discover it comes toppling down in a heap.
This is not a cruel joke created by God to thwart us and wear us out. It is the way to building oneself to the design of true self and honest being, rather than presumed solution and human ideality. There is not room for ‘oh I see the way, I’ve got this’ in the world where one chooses to take the path through the thickets that opens only after one has sat on the roadside of their life, crying into their lap, seemingly left behind on the course of living. There is only room for wiping one’s snotting nose and puffy eyes on the dusty sleeve and getting up to take that one next step that opens a maybe way.
This is hope, faith, and trust. This is life.
So I move on now-first right now-to a walk across the sun-drenched December fields of Gethsemani’s 200 acres.
In spirit, to this place where tears well and inexplicably hold court on my emotions.
In goal? To plod on in my life from this point forward, not by planning, but by living.
A living that is getting to see how the road behind me, long and well worn, holds amazing beauty and light, and has been this, really, all along.
A living, where planning on my part has tried to take the helm, and how this effort has been the point at which I found myself running on a treadmill onto which I hadn’t consciously stepped. While I can judge them personal mistakes and missteps, which of course they were, it is time to reframe and redefine them so they can be seen for the worthwhile stepping stones they’re intended on my route going forward. Where I planned, this treadmill of burnout rose. When I lived, grace, beauty, light, and wonder grew.
What I think I am feeling here at Gethsemani is this; my living is still a road I get to walk, and it has so much more light and beauty left to shine into the world. Or at least, onto the path that is just opening there before me, as I lift my eyes and wipe my tears and see the next step waiting my foot-fall.