Back on Track
For her 4th birthday, my granddaughter was given a two-wheel bicycle with training wheels. In the pitch of emotion and excitement on her birthday, her attempts to ride the bike did not meet her expectations and her spirit exploded in an outburst of emotion. The day ended in tears and exhaustion.
A couple of days later, after some rest and with her mind hard at work to figure this all out, she got back on the bike and sailed off on the sidewalk loop in front of their house. In her confidence and joy she declared, “I’m back on track!”
Children often show me fundamental truths in the clearest way. These last two-plus years of Covid have generated powerful emotions in me, and I am coming to notice, more and more, how many ways I have shut down – emotionally, relationally, physically, spiritually. While on the outside I have kept going and found ways to accommodate the ups and downs, the limitations, the plans made and canceled, I am discovering the ways I have distanced my mind from my heart.
There is little about the Covid experience that has met my expectations or even hopes; and Covid is still with us. While I have shed some tears here and there, my well-being might have been better served by a momentous explosion in an outburst of emotion – anger, sadness, emptiness, fear, loss, frustration.
Thanks to the wisdom of my granddaughter, I’m going to focus on rest and some time to reflect on my Covid experience. I might even find myself exploding in emotion. Because what I want and need and hope for . . . is to confidently and joyfully declare, “I’m back on track!”
There’s something almost “Brigadoon-ish” about the view when the fog settles into the valleys here among the mountains. It feels as though we’re in a ‘time out of time’ here. The edges get blurred, the clock seems to stop, and the firm structure of daily rhythm seems to slip away.
Today, I awoke to another foggy, rainy day. After some morning errands, I arrived home to another small window without rain. No sun this time and another garden to weed and clean. What would carry me along? I began to think about my family roots here in the mountains, going back at least 150 years on my dad’s side of the family. And I thought of my dad. He is 100 years old and lives in a nursing home. He doesn’t have dementia, but his thoughts and his conversation are an interesting, humorous, and much-of-the-time fictitious mix of his life’s experiences. While he’ll engage in a conversation of sorts for a little while, what he loves more than anything is listening to music on his MP3 player. He has a running set list of jazz and big band music from the 1930’s and 1940’s. So, in honor of Dad, and the life I treasure here in the mountains, today I listened to Benny Goodman and his orchestra. It was a different connection to the earth – to roots of a family sort; deep, sometimes tangled, old, firm.
Despite the joy and relief that comes with Spring and all of its primal energies, there is something about winter that is deeply ‘home’ for me. In the dead of winter, when the air is icy and the ground is white, there is a quiet and peace that prevails for me. Sounds are muffled by the blanket of snow. Colors are sharply diminished to white and various shades of grey and black. Rather than being distracted by sights and sounds and smells, I breathe deeply into the simplicity of vision – shapes and shadows, light and lines, softness and stillness. I can gaze endlessly into this monochromatic scene and receive it with wonder. How many intricate and detailed ways can the complexity and diversity of creation be expressed in black and white?
I walk this loop regularly, and while I am delighted to have this river crossing restored, what stands out to me most, is this. In the middle of the bridge is a bench, with a plaque that says ‘for community.’ Alongside the bench is a snow shovel. In the winter months, when snow is on the ground much of the time, I have yet to cross this bridge when someone has not already shoveled a path. I don’t know who does it; is there one person who does it all or most of the time? Is it the first person who happens to cross just after a snow? I only know how grateful I am to have a path already cleared so I can continue walking the loop.
The intention of spiritual direction is to provide a safe, confidential, sacred space in which to reflect on all of life’s questions and concerns. People choose to enter into this sacred space for a variety of reasons. Some people come for an established amount of time to address a specific question or concern. Others engage in spiritual direction as an ongoing commitment to self-care, often alongside psychotherapy, exercise, energy work, massage, and other forms of care for the whole person – mind, body, spirit.
This word – overwhelm – has been on the lips of so many people in my life these days. They seem to be describing a collective experience of suffering – too many tragedies, too much suffering, too many demands, too much rancor and division in the public sector. And many people also speak of the challenge of taking time to stop and care for themselves. It seems to be a toxic mix of overscheduling, physical exhaustion, emotional depletion, and guilt which stands in the way of pausing to rest, reflect, and rejoice in the precious moments that move through our days. These moments are crowded out by urgency, anger, competition, and isolation.
“The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”—President Ronald Reagan, from his First Inaugural Address.
“Prayer is not just spending time with God. It is partly that – but if it ends there, it is fruitless. No, prayer is dynamic. Authentic prayer changes us – unmasks us, strips us, indicates where growth is needed. Authentic prayer never leads us to complacency, but needles us, makes us uneasy at times. It leads us to true self-knowledge, to true humility.” ~ St. Theresa of Avila
Susie N. Allen 