Just stop and be. . .

"Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." -John Lennon

I just spent part of this afternoon with my sweet but senile grandfather. He lives in an assisted living community, because of his degenerating Alzheimer's condition. He sometimes refers to me as his daughter, and tells the exact same stories within the span of a few minutes. Morris Johnson, proud of his Swedish heritage and life as a farmer and postman; he tries to hang on to his memory and dignity, as monotony and boredom seem to make them slip away.

For a long time in his stuffy apartment, I carefully look through the family photo albums. Pictures from my dad's childhood, ugly 60's outfits and hairdos, my dad with acne before his prom and graduation. My grandparents in black and white, courting and dating just after the war; my grandma, a newly graduated nurse, my grandpa, a college dropout taking over the family farm. My aunts and uncles at all different ages, and sometimes, me and my cousins turn up near the end of photo albums, awkward preteens with glasses, or small babies and toddlers immersed in piles of fall leaves.

Morris, my patriarch, has lived so much life. And now that he lives alone, confused and forgetful, missing my grandma after her death, what is he living for? Has he lived a full life? Is he still valuable to us, or have we put him away in this place so that we don't have to deal with him and his aging and degenerating state?

Sometimes I think we live so fast in this culture so that we don't have to think about death. The day after my grandma died three years ago, we went back to life as usual, we didn't even take time to grieve. We didn't know how to cope with her absence, let alone have it remind us of our own mortality.

Lately, I keep searching frantically for some raison d'etre, some overarching purpose or meaning to my life. And of course, I am constantly afraid that I am missing it. I'm not living life fully enough. I might be missing something right in front of my eyes.

But as I was driving home on the country roads after visiting my grandpa, I was astounded by the gorgeous wildflowers that sprang up on both sides of the road; purple, yellow and orange everywhere. I was reminded of the verse, I think somewhere in Matthew, that talks about the birds of the air and the flowers of the fields. We always interpret that verse as how we ought to trust this deity for everything. And maybe so. But perhaps something else we should learn from the birds and the flowers is to emulate their ability to just BE. They don't work and stress and worry and everything else; they just ARE. They simply exist, in all their beauty. They just are.

I'm always looking so hard for new possibilities and hoping not to miss my great calling, that I often forget to just LIVE.
So, just stop and learn how to live. That's my great calling for right now.

Confessions. . . .

Confession, to myself, and those who know me best, and to the God who haunts me still:

I live so fast in order to escape what I'm truly thinking. . . .

Perhaps I've known it all along. I think I have. I have just not wanted to admit it. I thought that the cure for my restlessness would be to be in a different place next year, doing different work. That somehow clarity would naturally come. But I know wherever I could possibly be in the coming year, doing whatever "good things," I would be missing out on what is truly important.

I live at such a breakneck speed, on a stress-induced adrenaline high, so that I don't have to face myself. And perhaps, also, so that I do not have to face God.

I found myself longing for Youthworks today, the job, the pace, the people, the stress- all of it. And for what? In my mind, Youthworks has that aura of a "good work," something worthwhile done for the sake of God or else to further my own subconscious pride or self-righteousness that I was making the world just a little bit better; but when it came down to it, during my full summer of Youthworks in Cairo, I would run myself ragged each week from Sunday until Friday, and then on Saturday, I would become. . . . . .indescribably pensive. We do all these things, and for what? To make ourselves feel better? To let these youth give themselves a pat on the back and go home to their genuinely cushy lives? What does it mean to grieve over the state of this world, and thus change one's life to work to reverse it? I could not rationalize away the things I saw in Cairo, or my own weakness and fallibility to actually do jack-shit about them.

Perhaps the secret to becoming truly strong is to admit and know how really weak and fallible we are. . . . .

There are a few quotes that cause me to stop and wonder about WHAT I'm doing and WHY I'm so restless to leave this place:

"The real journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." -Marcel Proust
"We can do no great things. We can only do small things with great love." -Mother Theresa
"Calcuttas are everywhere, if only we have eyes to see them. Go, and find your Calcutta." -Mother T again.

I sometimes tend to think that my job or my committments here in the Twin Cities aren't doing enough for the "state of the world." I tell myself that there are millions of orphans dying of starvation and AIDS in Africa, and I am here, taking two rowdy urban boys to the community pool in my free time. Is this how I've chosen to show love, in this place, for this time? Why do I put certain degrees of worth on certain endeavors or certain places? What IS the most important thing to pursue in life? I ask myself that question all the time.

Do I think that by escaping to another country or another city that all my questions and insecurities are just going to magically disappear? Will I actually give effort to SLOWING DOWN and understanding myself and the moment, or will I just continue to live life at the same breakneck speed that I always have? Will I finally understand God outside of the fucked-up-ness of organized religion if I keep racing through life so quickly that I can't hear God's whisper in the small things?

I walked along the Mississippi river last night, as the sun was going down behind the skyline, and I finally STOPPED and LOOKED. I felt the leaves of the bushes on my fingers, marveled at their softness and newness. I stared at the river's immensity, a reminder of how small I truly am, and how things are always changing ("you can't step in the same river twice"). I watched the traffic stream above me on the commuter bridges, and I wondered how many people even glanced at the sunset, or were they too preoccupied by their I-Pods or cell phones? I stopped on the Franklin bridge sidewalk for several minutes and really STARED at the sky as it changed and marbled and melted into something resembling the first moment human conception or mixing paint or horses being set free. I must have looked somewhat strange, just standing there, perfectly still and mesmerized in the middle of the sidewalk, my eyes transfixed on the clouds that couldn't have been more beautiful. I can't believe in the "God " of organized religion. Nope, still can't. But I can understand and connect with the idea of a mystical, incredible deity that would make THAT on the sky each night, just to make us stop and remember that Presence that's beyond us and somehow deep inside us.

And if there's some kind of work that this deity is doing in this crazy world, I can't pretend to know it, or imagine what will become of us after we shuffle off this mortal coil. And I don't claim to know how to pray. . . .but if I did, I think it's something like what Rilke wrote in the Book of Hours:

You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe;
I know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down,
and that without a sound.

The wall is builded of your images.

They stand before you hiding you like names,
And when the light within me blazes high
that in my inmost soul I know you by,
the radiance is squandered on their frames.

And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.

To know where you're going, you have to understand where you've been

"And the end of all our exploring will be to return to the place where we first started and know it truly for the first time." -T.S. Eliot

I don't know how many posts on this blog I have started with quotes from Eliot. He's kind of my I-Ching for life and change and everything else in between. Google him. You'll see.

Eliot seems to put my questions into words in a way that I never thought that I could.

I'm really restless lately, trying to figure out a lot of life plans and possibilities, and understand my part in the bigger world. I feel so lost sometimes, because there is no real source of direction, I think I'm just making a shot in the dark. I suppose I can stop anxiously searching for the "right" path, and just BE. . . .

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

And as I was googling the text for that poem, I stumbled upon this sermon transcript. Very, very much worth reading and pondering:
http://www.stjohnsuu.org/sermons/20030511.html