Category Archives: Prayer

Passalong Thinnings

28 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Prayer, Soul Care

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

Guests wander out to my cottage garden, even in the horrible heat of summer.

The garden is showy right now, even though it claims such little space.  Hollyhocks grow next to tomatoes.  Lambs Ear competes with Black-Eyed Susans, to see who can claim more space.  Both are prolific and haven’t learned to make do with what this gardener has granted them.

It’s human nature too, to want more space than we really need.  My sister’s newly renovated home is a perfect size — 1104 square feet to be precise — where mine is around 2600.  I’m of the mind these days to downsize my house and up-size my garden space.

Two of my three bedrooms are rarely used.  Bryan borrowed “his” for about a month after graduation and I expect, upon his return from southeast Asia, Kyle will once again use his.  But these borrowings will be nothing more than brief interludes.  Soon, Kyle will claim his own space and my husband and I will become true empty-nesters.

Today my husband turns 55 with me following suit in October.  When I look at my husband, I don’t really see a man growing old;  instead, I see my husband, no worse for the wear and tear of 55 years of living and the raising of four children.  I hope he can say the same about me.

But my children already see me different; yesterday, during Bryan and Amy’s move, I was protected from most heavy lifting.  I guess my children regard me as fragile.  Is it because I don’t hear as well as I once did?  I confess to knees that creak as I walk down the stairs, and getting stiff when I sit too long on my sister’s floor, painting walls near baseboards.

During one of those hard-to-rise episodes of painting low to the floor, my sister shared a story of a local Shawnee woman, aged 80, who still gets on her riding lawnmower to mow her own lawn.  God willing, I pray to be like this ‘old woman” too.  I don’t want to stop living as long as I have breath in my body.  I want to be active.  I want to contribute to others welfare, to make life better for those whose paths I cross, even if it means just leaving an extra nice tip when dining out.

Soon, I will thin out my garden.  I’ll divide perennials, remove greedy hogs like that Joe Pye Weed — whatever was I thinking, to add a plant in my postage stamp garden, that is brazen enough to calls itself “WEED?”– and dig up some of those naughty Cleome that have seeded themselves throughout the garden.  I’ll pass along my thinnings to someone else to the benefit of both of our gardens.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to do the same with myself.  Maybe I can continue to pass along the best parts of myself,  so that even as I grow old, I won’t be regarded as old and useless but more like a treasured antique — worth holding on to, worth spending time with.

The roses outside are in all stages of life — some newly bloomed, others in their red prime and still others growing pink and papery dry along their edges.  But all are beautiful to my eyes.

Lord knows we can’t control how others regard us.  But we can control how we regard ourselves.  And somehow, in a hard-to-explain way, these views are inextricably linked — one feeds off another.  The state of my physical health is in part what I see and feel about myself, but is it not also, how others view and see me?  God knows I would not have rushed off to Urgent Care about my Brown Recluse Spider bite had it not been for others telling me to go…

I need to live planted in the firm of both perspectives —  mine and others who care for me —  for somewhere in the middle, truth exists.  Somewhere in the middle of that love, God exists.  And there, grounded in truth and humility, I can continue to thrive to passalong thinnings of my best self.

Love Waits

27 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by in Far Away Places, Life at Home, Prayer, Soul Care

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Somewhere in the churchyard of St. Paul’s cathedral, my husband sits in Sunday afternoon, waiting for his London hotel room to be prepared.

Further east, my youngest son Kyle lives in Sunday evening, waiting to go to bed to prepare for his fourth week of teaching in southeast Asia.  I was able to hear a bit about his new life, during a 20 minute phone call last night — though I must confess that hearing the sound of his voice was just as good as hearing the news he shared.

Meanwhile, here I sat at home, a West living in the West, who waits in Sunday morning.  For what do I wait?

I wait for Max to get well.  Our standard poodle Max has been suffering a stomach upset from a bug picked up at doggie daycare this week, where the dogs went to play while our house was receiving a new roof.  One of his canine sisters brought home the bug and now each has suffered the same ailments, with Max having last rites.

I wait for today’s family lunch, where remnants of family will gather around a local pub for lunch and a visit.  It is always good to sit in the midst of people I love best in the world — to see their faces, their smiles; to hear their voices and snippets from their lives.  I will try to enjoy the ones I’m with — rather than mourn the absence of those further afield.

I wait in prayer as Bryan, Amy and Amy’s sister Emily pack and load a moving van full of Bryan and Amy’s furniture.  Soon, all their ‘must-haves’ for everyday life will find their proper place in the “new” vintage apartment that lies just a hop, skip and a jump from here.  I pray for an injury-free transfer, for furniture is so very heavy and bulky.   I pray for safety in driving an unfamiliar moving van.  And sometimes I pray for something that I can’t quite name, though it rests near the lump of my throat.

All of these thoughts about waiting make me realize that much of my life is spent in a state of waiting.  For the most part, mine is not an anxious, stress-filled waiting but rather an attempt to ride through the moment, to see how everyday life will unfold, to see where I will be carried by the river of God.

I’ve learned there is a spirituality of waiting, something picked up from the writings of Henri Nouwen, that I encountered as a first-year student of Heartpaths Spirituality Centre.  Henri introduces his reflections on waiting with words that paint a familiar scene:

“Waiting is not popular.  In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time.  Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going!  Do something!  Show you are able to make a difference!  Don’t just sit there and wait!”  For many People, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go.  And people do not like such a place.”

Waiting can be difficult.  Sometimes, I want to know how “it” will all end.  And I want to know “it” now.”    The reason is fear, of course, as Henri points out later in his writing, and my wish for certainty rather than “lumps in my throat.”  Where fears are related to wishes, hope is related to trust, Nouwen teaches.

While I endeavor to wait out everyday life in hope rather than fear, I wait in the company of love, which makes up for many sins and shortcomings, at least in my book.   And how wonderful to know that someone, somewhere, is waiting for us.  How wonderful it is to know that we are missed when we become separated by time and space.

Does God miss me, I wonder.  Does God wait for me to return “home?”  I’d like to think ‘yes’  — though here’s hoping that heaven can wait too — at least for a while.

The Nature of Listening

31 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Prayer, The Great Outdoors, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Thunder awakes the night sky.   Heavy raindrops come.  Then the wind.  Last of all, lightening.

I should be asleep right now but I’m glad I’m not.  I’m glad I’m up to listen to this final rainstorm of May.  Yet how long will I listen?  All too soon, the sounds will fade into the background.   I will become immersed in my writing.  In spite of good intentions, I won’t listen.

I confess to being a lazy listener.  It comes from thinking I know what will be said.   My husband was guilty of this crime yesterday morning – I told him I had fed the poodles before coming back to bed at five a.m. – he thought I told him to feed the poodles.  So making like hobbits, the poodles enjoyed second breakfast.

In my online writing class last month, I learned that listening is the most important thing I can do to write well.  In fact, my teacher stressed that listening is more important than writing everyday. Taking her words to heart, I’m trying to listen a little closer to my world these days.

Yesterday afternoon, while walking from our car to the Paseo Art Festival, I enjoyed a frolic of a conversation between a black woman in a wheelchair and her chatty male neighbor.  I needed pen and paper to get the proper nuances of speech down.  So foreign were their expressions and words, it was like listening to a different language.  Just like when I travel abroad, I heard music rather than lyrics.   But even without the actual words, the memory of  their cadence is richer than a hot fudge sundae.

Walking behind the fast-moving power scooter, the woman appeared to have lost her legs.  Maybe that’s what I expected to see. When I caught up with her at the corner visiting a few more neighbors, I saw her legs were intact.  Sort of like my ears, her legs weren’t working as they ought, doing their intended job, though they were there all the same.

It’s still raining, but just barely.  In spite of good intentions, I’ve missed the heart of this quick, not quite summer storm.  But I enjoyed what I heard of it.  I need to tune into life more often.

I need to tune into the source of life more often too.  Of late, listening to God is the hardest work of all.  I don’t want to be still.  I don’t want to think.  I just want to do.  Keep my hands busy so my mind doesn’t have time to think.  And what am I avoiding?  Well, the hard work of grieving of course.

Grieving is the worst sort of listening.  One wakes up to realize that we don’t have forever in this world, that we are strangers speaking a strange tongue in a world that is not ultimately our own.  We wake to find we’ve no more opportunities to hear that much loved voice and the stories it told.  We wake to see we’ve taken for granted our loved one’s life and their presence in our own.

We wake to see that we let too many raindrops slip through our fingers without ever attempting to hold them in our hands.  Our hands are dry rather than wet with failed attempts.  My hands should be wet with failures.  My  hands should be wet with life.

I should be wet behind the ears.  Being wet behind the ears — that is, to take in everything as a young child —  is not necessarily a bad thing, though we speak of it as if it were.  Being wet behind the ears goes hand in wet hand with the nature of listening.