pull up a chair

i likened the way i was feeling to all the leaves quaking in the wind all around me, the day a tumbling down of golden-glowing five-point sails, a summer’s worth of sunshine stored and radiant and dropping now to autumn’s calling. 

i felt all aflutter inside. in an exhausted, tank-tapped-out sort of way. in the sort of way that so rarely hits, but when it does, i know to listen. it has been a long, long summer, followed by an uphill fall, preambled by a bumpy spring. and my whole self––all sinew and bone, every ligament and synapse––was calling for a holy pause. 

i listened.

out of fear and trembling as much as anything. afraid i just might topple if i didn’t give myself a sabbath day. sabbath on a thursday. the God who calls to me is not a Day-Minder god. mine is a God who must have looked down upon my weary, worn-thin soul and whispered just enough caution that i couldn’t help but listen.

so this is how my day of good collapse unfolded:

i walked amid the golden-tumbling leaves. i walked and walked. and listened to the rushing wind. i raked my garden, and dug up errant brambles, brambles that had shoved aside the finer, tamer citizens of my so-called farm. i excised the thorny rascals from their elevated plot and moved them down and north to where they might stretch and reach without elbowing out the neighbors. while there on my knees at the raised-bed edge, i raked my hand through spent black earth, the summer’s labor ended. it’s time now for all the loam to bask in winter’s sun, drink up that for which it thirsts. and so i cleared the way, shooshed away the detritus the way a farmer tills her tired, worn-thin field. make-believe is but one of my balms; i’ve escaped into once-upon-a-time as far back as my brain cells have ever stirred.

before calling it a day, i knocked on a neighbor’s door, just to say hello. and down we plopped, a necessary catch-me-up; long overdue. a chat with the good people with whom we intersect by accident of geography, is one of life’s unchoreographed and relished blessings.

and then, at last, i curled into my favorite chair and read and read: t.s. eliot is on this week’s docket. “east coker,” the quartet i read and read, trying to imagine a mind so lush it pours such words onto the page: 

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

it’s a poem that fits the day, the week, the season’s turning. and not only for its mention of the late november (a couple stanzas on). i find the sacred text of poets long-ago to be, at once, elixir and ablation. i find healing there, deep amid the stanzas. curled up, limbs tangled like an autumn vine, as the arc of sunlight rises, falls, and rises once again…

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the world is testing us, all of us who can’t abide the horrors. and so i found solace in the words of  the late, glorious, raspy-throated leonard cohen who proclaimed this:

“I wanted to stand with those who clearly see G-d’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.”

Leonard Cohen

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and finally this one short paragraph might hold more than enough to think about through the week of gratitudes ahead…

I have been thinking lately about how the search for God and the search for our deepest selves ends up being the same search. This insight is not unique to me, but it has become truer for me as I’ve grown older. Teresa of Ávila often expressed the wonderful idea that one finds God in oneself, and one finds oneself in God. Both are true! And when one experiences this and discovers one’s chosenness and inherent belovedness, one can rest deeply in it. Indeed, that is a great spiritual gift of contemplative seeing.

—Richard Rohr

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neither last nor least, happy 93 to my mama, who has fought hard these past many weeks to shuffle on again. and so she is—daunted, yes, but not surrendered. i could have written a meditation on my mama, but she much prefers to be out of the spotlight, at the edge of the crowd. i will say that as i roamed my mama’s house these past few alone times, browsed her bookshelves, plucked a tome or two, i’ve been struck––deeply––by the many titles she has saved that are ones i cannot wait to take to heart. eliot’s four quartets among them. the complete works of robert frost. botanical shakespeare: an illustrated compendium. i am so so grateful for this gentle chapter of my mother’s life. when she is harbored well in a lovely place and we just might have time to learn another thing or two about each other’s souls. i love you mama, in case you’re reading this. xoxoxo

how might you choreograph a day of good collapse?