those few radiant threads…

by bam

scenes from Tumbledown Farm, where i taught this week

it was a whirling dervish of a week. a week that pulled me this way and that. that drew me far from home, for long stretches at a time. and when the ground beneath me slip-slides, when the air around me begins to thin, and i find myself dizzy from the pace, the worry, i find myself reaching for holy mooring.

holy mooring to me looks like this:autumnclematis

or this: hydrangeayellowandwhite

i reach out and cup my palms around the beauty and the blessing, try to hold it there for just a moment. drink it in. let it sink into my pores. behold would be the verb.

more often than not this week, i found my mooring not in grand sweeps of majesties but in the tiniest radiant stitches, in unnoticed, barely whispered acts of loving. when my heart’s aquiver, i find it musters muscle when it’s called beyond its own walls. when it reaches out to shove away the jostle that stumbles the ones i love. especially the one i will secretly, always, call “my little one.”

his week this week made his shoulders slump — under the weight of a backpack that must weigh 50 pounds, and another one filled with soccer cleats and stinky goalie gloves, the one he left at home by accident, necessitating an indy-500 dash from the school door back to the roost, lest soccer coaches scowl.

i found myself soothed — oddly — in the moments when i was buckling my seat belt, jangling the keys into the ignition slot. when i was waiting for him to lope out the door and down the brick walk, juggling backpacks and the red plate that held his breakfast. i found myself soothed knowing that for the next maybe seven minutes he and i would be ensconced in the metal cocoon we call our old red wagon. the easy flow of words, of question and comment, might be our longest, deepest anchor in a day of rushing. i found myself soothed rinsing clumps of grapes, slicing chunks of cheese, laying out an afternoon’s snack on the rare day he had no soccer practice, but was due back at school for an evening assignment, one that once again would shove dinnertime nearly out the door.

maybe it’s transference — in missing his faraway brother, in knowing i’m no longer an actor in his brother’s everyday, i’m inserting myself in the only one whose day i can tangibly effect. maybe it’s anticipatory grief — a visceral knowing that his years at home are drawing toward a close (this week the high school convened a parents’ meeting to begin the college conversation for the flock of brand-new juniors), and with it this stint of mothering that has been my holy salvation, and i can’t bear for it to end. and so i indulge and relish every drop — folding the sweatshirts i find clumped on the closet floor, plucking favorite things off grocery store shelves, tucking love notes under pillows.

amid the whirl and pull of another overloaded week, holiness seeped in. oozed in through the cracks and crevices of the hours — in basking in the diluting rays of autumn sun. in wandering a meadow, beholding dappled golden light in woods just beginning to ignite into autumn’s fiery colors. in loving, always loving, the one sure mooring that will not, cannot, be submerged.

it is, as it always is, the tiniest radiant stitches that keep me whole, that keep me from fraying into tatters.

what keeps you whole? what were the radiant stitches of your week?

all the loveliness above (the pictures, i mean) comes from tumbledown farm, a magical landscape of barn and silo, chicken coop and pasture, where i got to amble this week, teaching an all-day writing and slowing time workshop. i’m still too shy to ever broadcast these adventures ahead of time, but i’m working on it. and one of these days i might boldly put out the word in time for anyone who’s interested to sign up. and yesterday — all day and into the night — i was leading a “spiritual spa day” for a host of magnificent women at an old and beautiful convent in chicago. september seems to have come on with a cymbal clang.