Fruit and Light

This evening, I was heading to a meeting at 13th and Oak Streets from my home in the east end. On I-71, I found myself idling in traffic lingering from a long rush hour. I felt my anxiety grow as the minutes ticked on and the cars merely inched forward. I was facilitating our gathering's opening prayer and reflection, so my late arrival would crunch an already-full agenda. I was regretting not leaving sooner, not somehow anticipating this delay.

Then, like a fresh breeze through the fumes, grace cleared my heart. As I looked into the Louisville skyline, the setting sun cast a gold light over the tall buildings, the metal cars, the crimson trees so that all as far as I could see was touched and illuminated in its mundane splendor. I felt my mind soften; anxiety would serve no one. I felt gratitude well up inside for such a lovely moment and the space to pay attention to it.

I glanced to my left at precisely the right moment to see the next, breath-taking spectacle: a blue heron sailing so near and slowly over the stalled expressway that I could see her elegant legs tucked into her body as she flew directly over my car. Her long beak and gentle wingbeats, her steady and unhurried path through the air, was a wordless message from beyond myself. I looked right and watched her descend into the trees. Only then did the traffic begin to move again.

Twice today, two different friends shared this simple parable with me - the repetition gave me pause to listen with care:

A man was running from a pack of tigers when he suddenly came to a cliff. Quickly, he scurried over the cliff, clinging to some hanging vines to escape. But looking down, he saw more tigers below, looking up at him in anticipation. Then, he noticed a little mouse above him, nibbling the vine to which he clung. Tigers above, tigers below, an insecure perch. Glancing furiously around for an escape, his eyes landed on a vine of wild strawberries hanging within his reach. He then recognized just how beautiful the sunset looked from such a height. He reached over, plucked a strawberry, and savored it with all his will as he gazed into the setting sun.

I know these lessons have come to me because I need them. My straits are not so dire as the fellow clinging to the edge of a cliff - in fact, I am eager to dismiss my struggles because they seem like trivial preoccupations when compared to suffering near and far. There are not tigers immediately above or below me. There are vines and vines of strawberries at my fingertips. Many ache with longing for the faculties and resources to just hold on, like I can by no effort of my own.

But comparison does not change reality, it only undermines my experience of it. Neglecting my own pain is closing the door to awareness of our deeper, common pain. Tending to any pain can consecrate it, can transmute it in service of healing. So can tending to beauty. A wise mentor once said that, by fully savoring and using for good the privileges of my life, I could serve humanity by lending my experience to their utility. If I were to feel too guilty, unworthy, or afraid to use them, I would be squandering them on behalf of all Life.

There are always tigers above and below us. Oppressive systems that operate quietly in plain sight, corrupt leadership that perpetuates games of power, international conflict and gun violence that leave countless dead each day, old ways that keep us from manifesting what is meant to become, new threats that distract us from what it means to be human: these and many others are our common perils. If we are lucky, we cling to each other, waiting, working, hoping.

There are always strawberries and sunsets to savor. The fruit of true relationships, meaningful work, powerful community, deep engagement with the world; the light of gentleness, speaking truth, grounded introspection, compassionate action - these are what we must notice if we are to keep holding in the tension, with intention. Thank goodness we do not just look at the side of a cliff - we can look into each other's eyes and see the mirror of all that is most beautiful, most essential, in our perilous and precious human condition.

Eventually, I alighted off the expressway onto Market Street, due west. The evening air channeled through my open windows as the last strains of an operatic song floated from my car speakers. I looked over to see a festive cook-out happening in an urban park - neighbors laughed and ate while children played in front of graffiti across the lawn. Tables and tables of people and food, lovingly prepared and gathered in celebration on a Tuesday night. Tears sprang to my eyes at the common joy. Smoke rising from the grill caught the golden sun, and smiles all around emitted light. I watched them as long as I could, until they were out of sight.

Loss

On a light day, the fall can feel like bright festivity. Blue skies draw awareness to the crimson tops of trees, cheery in contrast, playful in their varied hues. Busy squirrels and birds tend to nuts and berries and seem to prepare for a cool-weather party. Soft breezes offer gentle refreshment, warmed by the brilliant sun.

In time, the splendor makes way for inevitable decay. Soon, the leaves will brown and curl on the frozen ground. Animals will hide away and hope their storage sustains them through whatever winter brings. The sun will retreat into long, dark nights and gray days. The limbs of the trees will cling to an empty sky.

At times, celebration is clearly an appropriate response to life's beauty - the harvest, worthy of awe and thanks, leads us to effortless reverence and joy. But times when our efforts appear to lay fallow, descend like discarded leaves, or disintegrate into dead earth leave us hollow. How can such loss and letting go yield thanks? Especially when our work has been in attempted service to greater good, the pain can be felt as betrayal.

Both tenderness and decomposition make the fodder for our lives. Each instructs us, if we can receive the movements with malleable hearts, how to become shaped for the times we are given. We can learn to mute our own desires for what is required to receive the gift. We can relinquish old ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing to see the present as it really is. We can shed the hardened skin of ambition to bare our raw, vulnerable humanity.

Through fires and rivers, celebration and sacrifice, we are shown how to see the sacredness of every season; how to treasure what is precious and essential; and how to let go, to be saved.

~*~

"In Blackwater Woods"
by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

Freedom

My husband and I walk along the beach at night, hand-in-hand, guided by the roar of the waves and faint, distant lights. The thick clouds of the day's heavy rains are dissipating; with each step along the sand, another star shimmers through the gray veil. The water gently laps our feet to keep a path ahead smooth and clear.

We find our way to two wooden chairs and recline, taking in the vastness. The rushing waters necessitate an encompassing silence and draw us each into deep reverie and repose. I marvel at the keen twinkle of the stars that make them seem to dance in their firmament. If I was billions of miles closer to them, I could truly see the roiling surface of these monstrous gas spheres. But from such a distance, the stars are brought alive only by illusions of atmosphere and imagination.

I think of the small seed of a baby within me, minuscule and intricate enough to mimic the many lovely shells scattered over the sand. I think of my boy, now asleep not so far away, who earlier tentatively traced patterns in the sand with a scavenged shovel, discerning the appeal of this new matter. Tears catch in my throat as I feel in my spirit the grand possibilities of their lives, the wonder and adventure awaiting them. Will they, too, someday meander along a beach at night, look up at the stars, and feel the power of their finity and smallness? Will they think of their mother and father?

I lay my hand on my husband's arm and speak from my heart into the darkness. I tell him that I need times to rest in wildness and remember then what I am as a human. I long for spaces where I feel the edges of my life, my perpetual closeness to death, and can rekindle love for living. The sky and sand, the water and fire of ocean and stars, hold dominant sway over me - I want to remember and know it.

That which is most transcendent in me rejoices that I have a life to embody, a being in which to experience the holy terror of my lack of separateness. Someday, I will be the foam along the shore. Someday, when Earth has died, I will be mere molecules in a stunning planetary nebula. Tonight, however, I am amazingly human, and I am not afraid. Looking at the sky, I can only cry at the harsh beauty and wish that my children can be free, free, forever.

Our son was the first person in the world to be born an Olivam. Our next child will be the second. My husband and I chose a new name together because we believe in what we can choose to create. We did not choose it because we hope the name will live on for generations, or because we hope to impart some permanent mark on the children who will bear beyond us. All we seek to choose is what we can live for, which we hope will, in all things, be peace - an extended olive branch, fruit that nourishes and heals.

 the first seashell my son intentionally
chose, then gave to me as a gift 

My few hopes for my children I carry like fragile shells in my palm: a delicate prayer that they discover and cherish their hearts' passions against any judgment; a whispered song that their poetry is treasured by others who know them honestly; a silent mantra of promise that they taste bitterness with wonder and savor sweetness with grace. Though their lives, like mine, are ephemeral and granular like shifting sand, they too are wave-emanations of an oceanic cosmos, born to crest and roar and carry something precious before returning to the source. I delight in the mystery that I will never know their journeys fully. I am humbled imagining that I connect to them now, in some unfathomable way, as I gaze at the stars and envision a future in which they will do the same.

After a time, we stand together and begin the walk back home, spoken and unspoken reflections reverberating across the broad, elemental planes. Every step is washed away by the tide coming in; no impression is left except on our own patterns of memory. His warm hand, like the water, brings comfort in the cool night. His gentle grasp tethers me to the path we choose walk; my sinking feet in the sand tell me again the truth of what lasts forever.