Week 19

Grace, Wonder, and a List

Well that closer to Week 18 was a bit of hubris eh? “Spring will have to wait.” Spring waits for no one, although we wait forever it seems. It just sashays on in when it feels like it and here it is.

So yes, there is heart break which springtime worsens, but the heart also breaks open which spring makes better If we’re lucky. Or if we have wicked good friends with those same open hearts who keep saying, “let it rip; we’re here.”

“It is the nature of grace to always fill spaces that have been empty,” says Goethe.

I would amend that to say, “spaces that have been emptied,” because I think what happened during and after Week 18 (the writing and posting of it that is) is that I have felt grace enter into spaces that I have emptied. Or maybe rinsed out, cleaned. It’s an abstraction beyond modifiers. But if I let the grief pass through me: tears, words, sentences, rehashings, instead of boxing it and stashing it in some closet where we are supposed to hide unseemly things, then the grace gains access so to speak. I have made space for it and then whoa boy, look out.

A caveat: for me grace thrives in the present moment. The heart crushing past leaves me graceless and the present is a place that is hard for me to hang on to these days, overcome as I often am by…you know (see Weeks 1-18).

If I hang on to a present moment I can take in what’s around me and if there’s some grace I can grab on to, I stand a chance of gaining access to a state of wonder.

And the present moment is spring. And wonder arrives when I detect just how lucky I am to be drawing breath on this miraculous planet. Who or what, for example, exactly figured out that trees should exhale what we need to inhale and vice versa? This, to unearth an antiquated phrase, blows my fucking mind. Which leads me to make a list!!! (cue my friend Deb here who shares my passion for lists!!!).

And here it is:

What I want to give thanks/pray/wish/hope for

• That chestnut trees continue to bloom in both pink and white

• That coffee pickers make a living wage and do not have their homes ripped from them by greedy first world caffeine addicts like me

• That the new longevity research not be co-opted by the cosmetic industry and instead remains focused on organ regeneration and cancer remission

• That the Great Lakes continue to be healed and heal themselves

• That people keep writing and reading books

• That the two “used” birds’ nests in my eaves up here in northern michigan continue to provide affordable housing for new families as they are this spring

• That artists keep making music and singing songs that we can take on the road or into the shower or dance and cry to in the kitchen

• That my many many nieces and nephews grow up to inhabit a planet where there are still chestnut trees and medical miracles.

• That the Chicago Bulls rebuild a franchise that is worthy of its hometown

• That Dude has found Richard and they are walking a warm path together, off leash. Both of them.

• That all those suffering from despair or addiction or both (it’s often both) and particularly my brother, find their way out of the darkness and the strength to begin again.

• That the miraculous carpet of trillium in the northern springtime woods return again and again and again.

• That the marvelous creatures of the ocean do not get relegated to pretty novels and disney movies and we nurture a habitat they can survive in.

• That we humans gain enough courage and lose enough fear to be able to cut holes in the many fences and walls we have built that really, in the end, do no fucking good.

• That organizations like Earthjustice and Democracy Now! and Partners in Health take over the world

• That ancient lilacs, scraggly, spindly, sometimes bowing but still blooming, never die.

Amen.