Category Archives: Writing

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It’s All How You Look At It

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Stan Freeburg’s comedy musical “The United States of America” contains a line where a Native American remarks to Christopher Columbus that they discovered the white man.  “Whaddya mean you discovered us?”  “We discover you on beach here…is all how you look at it.”  “Y’I suppose…I never thought of it that way,” Chris replies.

Dualistic thinking, good/bad, right/wrong, is all about thinking, as my sister pointed out in a comment.  It’s not about the actual thing in front of us.  So it seems that often all we learn about the world is about how we are thinking about or perceiving it.  Art and artists play around with this quite a bit, of course.  And then philosophers ask, “What is real?”

Who knows.

Do we choose to look at things in a way that gives us pleasure of some kind, even perverse pleasure?  Sure.  I think we photographers get to do this now more than ever with all the tweaking technology allows.  We get to illustrate the story going on inside our skulls.  Here’s an example.

Sample inner monologue: “Rural life is a thing of the past.  Flat, washed out, joyless and crumbling.  There is no life left in the earth by now.  Life is in the cities.  It’s time we bulldozed these ruins and built something we can inhabit.”

Of course, you could be having a completely different monologue in your brain with this image.  Go ahead, share it with us!  Here’s another:

Sample thought: “Ah, the good old days!  Blue skies, wood, stone, a farm.  Life was simpler; it meant something back then to work hard on the land.  All you need is within reach – your livelihood, your family, your pleasure.  Who could ask for anything more?”  Another:

Sample thoughts: “The world is an interesting juxtaposition of contrasting elements – texture, color, shape, pattern, organic and inorganic.  There’s no making sense of it.  The dynamic of life is about the tension and release we experience through our senses every day.  Nothing more.  I need a cigarette!”

There’s no right and wrong in this little exercise.  “Is all how you look at it!”  Please, have a go!  Amuse me!

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Half Way

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It occurs to me that I have reached the half way mark in my 50th year blogging project.  This is post #183; I’ve missed two days along the line somewhere, and I may yet miss another, so I probably won’t end up with a perfect 366 by August 20, but I’m calling today the half way point.  Whoo-hoo!  Time to check back on my original intent:

“So this blog is dubbed scillagrace to symbolize ancient elegance of manner, action, form, motion and moral strength.  It is my goal to post entries worthy of the name.  It is my goal to avoid being dogmatic and prissy.  I want to challenge myself to go deeper into subjects that explore the ancient grace of life.   It is a lot of name and a lot of subject, to be sure.  We’ll see how it goes.”

I have also realized that in the adventure of exploring the ancient grace of life, encounters with others are pivotal.  The challenge to go deeper is often voiced not by myself but by those whom I encounter.  The elegance of the dance is significantly effected by those who come alongside to partner me.  So I want to express my deep appreciation for all those who have participated in shaping this blog by liking it and leaving a signature that led me to meet them or commenting and entering into the dance directly.  I appreciate those who were strangers to me and those whom I’ve known in person for some time.   I have truly enjoyed, benefited, woken up, reeled, puzzled, thrilled, anguished, and grown here!  Thank you, one and all.

My gift to y’all today is to share the elegance of the world to which I woke this morning.  My little corner of the globe draped in February’s glory: snow.

Have a grace-filled day, all!

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Playing Chess with Death

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Last night, I watched Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal”.   There’s nothing like hitting a gray mood smack on the head with a black & white film about Death!  Yargh!  Into the breach, mates….

First of all, the photography.  Beach scenes, faces, clouds and silhouettes, clean, stark, intense.  They just put me in a mood to ponder dark and light without looking away.  Bring it!

Characters.  One of the questions Steve always asks after we watch a film together is “which character do you think is most like you?”  The characters in this film are icons of human stereotypes, in a way, but rather like the roles in a medieval morality play.  The knight is questing, always.  He wants to know and understand; his intellect is never satisfied.  Steve has a lot of that in him.   Jof, the juggler, is a childlike observer.  He is easy-going and happy, and he has visions.  He sees with his heart and doesn’t understand why others don’t see what he does, but he doesn’t preach about his visions, he writes songs about them.  I think Steve has some of that in him, too.  I identify with Jof myself.  The squire is shrewd, ironic, confident and direct.  He seems very grounded in his ego.  There are some other players, more simply drawn: the actor, the cuckold smith and his loose wife, Jof’s young wife and their baby, a silent girl who attaches to the squire, a witch and of course…Death.

How each of these folks engage with Death is fertile ground for the imagination.  If you’re questing, trying to find answers, strategically engaging Death in a game of chess, what is the lesson you are likely to learn?  That Death doesn’t have any answers, but he’s going to win the game.  And how would you take that?  It makes me think of my younger days, when I was in the throes of religious fervor, convinced that I was learning the big answers to the most important questions.  I wrote terribly pretentious poetry and harbored judgments about everything.  I thought I was going to “figure it all out” eventually.  That was after Death’s first visit to me, and before his second.  I had a few close calls in between that made me think I might be on the right track.  His re-appearance convinced me that I wasn’t really onto anything.  So, the questions remain.  I like how the knight gets increasingly comfortable with inviting Death to sit down and join him.  He learns a few things, he postpones the inevitable, he diverts Death’s attention away from his friends for a while, and he even shows Death that he can be happy while they play.  I am learning from his example.

The scariest part of the film is the depiction of fear itself.  The wailing and flailing and pleading for mercy is utterly desperate and triggers all kinds of panicky feelings in me as I watch.  I do NOT want to slide into that.  That’s the worst evil in the film.   Those people are being tortured and destroyed from the inside out.  It gives me the shivers!   This is a great example for me, too.  I don’t have to engage with Death in this manner.  I have other options.

The storm scene reminded me of a camping trip we took one spring.  After a balmy evening, a thunderstorm rolled in from across the hills to the west.  The sun had set and it grew quite dark, but just over the ridge, the lightning blazed up like bombs in a great war.  It was like watching a WWII movie, all black and white explosions in the distance.  And we were the only campers in the park, in a little nylon tent.   I was kind of scared.  I thought about doing the “safe and prudent” thing, striking camp and driving away.  Steve asked me, “Why?”  Well, because something bad could happen!  Bad like what?  We could get wet.  We could get hit by a falling tree or lightning.  We could, but it’s not highly likely.  We could just watch it and see what we learn.  And we can always get in the car, too, if we want.

So we stayed.  We did get wet.  We eventually went to the car.  We went home the next day.  But we saw the most amazing light show and felt the wind and heard the rain fall on every surface with a different sound.   And we experienced it together, present, honest, alive.   Take that, Fear!  Check!

Unknown's avatar

Four Years Ago Today

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I’m feeling rather gray and gloomy today, like the motionless monochrome sky.  I went out with wet hair, first to breakfast with Steve’s mom, then to do laundry at the laundromat, then to the grocery store.  I feel thoroughly chilled.  I think my hair is still wet.  Yet, there’s no snow on the ground, so I can’t really blame the weather.  It’s still far from wintry…not like it was, say, four years ago…

Four years ago, there was a snow storm.  Four years ago, the Super Bowl was on.  Four years ago, my husband was in the hospital.

I could give you the whole background history on his medical odyssey, but it would come out dry and clinical.  What I’m feeling now is more surreal.  Let’s just say that he was in the cardiac wing, waiting to be stabilized enough for surgery.  Waiting.  Like waiting for Godot.   There was no sense of time after a few days.  Doctors would come and go and offer conjectures and imagine scenarios.  I got the feeling that I should simply camp out with him and see what happened.  So I did.

My husband was a sports fan, and the Super Bowl game was a big party occasion on our calendar most years.   During the regular football season, we’d watch games together on Sunday afternoons and nap through a good chunk of them.  I can enjoy the game and root for the underdog or a sentimental favorite, and usually Jim would fill me in on some of the finer points of strategy or history.   I guess you could say we were companionable about it.  Jim watched a lot of TV in his later years, and in the hospital, there’s not much else to do.  “Camped out in the cardiac wing” meant that during visiting hours, you could find me squeezed in next to him on the bed, cranked up in sitting position, watching whatever was on the box suspended from the ceiling.   But I thought the Big Game should be more festive.  So I asked the nurses if we could watch it from the visitor’s lounge on the floor, on the big screen, and invite a friend or two.  They gave their permission.

It wasn’t a party.  It was just me, Jim and one of our church friends who stopped by for a while.  I brought a couple of coolers with snacks and drinks.  I got in trouble for bringing beer.  Not that Jim was drinking it, but I guess it was against some rule, because a nurse came by and told me I couldn’t have it there.  Jim was comfortably situated in one of the lounge chairs with his IV pole and beepy-thing beside him.  We were in clear view of the nurses’ station the whole time.  A few other hospital visitors peeked in periodically, but mostly, we were alone.  Our friend Dave told us that there was a huge snowstorm outside.  Toward the end of the game, we actually lost power for a while.  When it was over, it was past visiting hours, and I was concerned about digging my car out of the parking lot and driving home, so I packed up my coolers and kissed Jim good-bye pretty quickly.   Three days later, he had his surgery.  Ten days after that, he was dead.

I found out today that the two teams that are in the Super Bowl this year are the same two teams that played four years ago today.  They will play on Sunday.  And I won’t be watching.  I haven’t watched a football game in a long time.  We don’t even have a TV.

Life changes.  Waiting only lasts a while.  Those days, suspended in gray like a snowflake, drift down slowly, but eventually, they evaporate, and something else takes their place.

I’m okay with that…I think…  Yeah.  I’m okay.

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A Bigger World

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I’ve been thinking lately about my ego and my mood cycle.   Two days ago, I wrote “I feel that expansive, fecund, open sense bubbling up in me, settling me down, inviting me to nurture and set free.  Then, a while later, I feel a feisty urge to grab hold and wrestle with my circumstances and force them to conform to some idea in my brain.”  Right now, I’m in the restless part of my cycle, and my ego is eager to get to work on something.   It gives me a sort of shimmering sense of dissatisfaction, not like something is “wrong”, but like I’ve been sitting too long and want to stretch.  I don’t want to get into the habit of simply indulging my ego with any old thing whenever it prods me, though.   Steve often talks of feeling like he’s “treading water”, too.  He told me this morning that he wanted to work on “pointing his canoe”, which is his metaphor for re-establishing direction and putting energy into venturing forward, so I asked him if he uses some kind of ego energy to address that.   He said, “It’s not like that.  It’s more like gathering your courage and discipline to step into a bigger world.  I think the ego is a smaller world.”

I immediately got my pencil and notebook and wrote that down.

A bigger world.  A world that is beyond me, beyond my control, beyond prediction.  A bigger concentric circle.  I do think we tend to pull back into our tiny, lower-case universe, the one where we feel safe and comfortable and powerful.  We can’t really help that tendency, but we can acknowledge it and try to point our canoe in a different direction.  I am really inspired by people who do that, and through the network of blogging, I have met a few who I think are paddling away.  Maybe they’re not the people you’re thinking of.  They aren’t the extreme sportsmen.  They aren’t the world travelers.  They aren’t the social superstars.  They are the suffering, the ones who have met their limitations and crossed into the unknown.  They blog about living with their illness, their addiction, their recovery, their brain damage in a way that definitely requires them to gather courage and discipline and step into a bigger world, a world which they don’t master.  And sometimes they whine, and sometimes their posts are incredibly boring, but I keep visiting them because I think they are truly onto something.  I suppose that I am hoping to witness their breakthrough flight, when they will soar high above the rest of us into that bigger world of awareness.  I’m not sure what that will look like, but maybe I’ll recognize it anyway.

I am working on writing a memoir on my husband’s illness and death.  Four years ago, he had his last surgery.

The story of how he came out of anesthesia is perhaps a glimpse into that bigger world.  My oldest daughter wrote about it in her Live Journal that evening:

“When I saw him after the surgery, painkillers and low blood sugar had rendered him almost completely unresponsive. We tried everything—tickling him, turning his insulin pump off, talking to him, poking him—but the most we could get from him was a groan or a slight shift of position. I told him I was pregnant. Mom said they’d called a rematch of the Super Bowl. I even took a picture of him, threatening, I think, to mock him with it later. Nothing made any difference until I had to leave for work. I squeezed his arm and said “Bye, Dad. I love you,” and in a sleepy, submerged-sounding voice, he said “Love you.” We couldn’t get him to say or do anything else, but every time someone said “I love you,” he would immediately mumble it back.”

So, I think of Jim, hovering somewhere between consciousness and death and knowing only one response: “I love you”.   This is the Universe you don’t control.

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Parenting On the Dotted Line and Over the Rainbow

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Steve & I borrowed a DVD from the library called “Between the Folds”.  It’s a documentary about origami, but not just the decorative, brightly-colored little figures that school kids make.   It’s about science and mathematics and art and exploring the fusion of all those disciplines.  To learn more, click here.  One of the fascinating paper-folders interviewed is Erik Demaine, “an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Called one of the most brilliant scientists in America by Popular Science, he received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship at the age of 22. Demaine’s work combines science and art, geometry, paper folding and computational origami.”  The interview also includes footage of him with his dad, who apparently home-schooled him as a single parent and prepared him to enter college at the age of 12.  These two bear a touching family resemblance of soft-spoken, constantly smiling Geekdom, complete with pony-tails, facial hair and glasses.  It is obvious that they have enjoyed sharing a couple of decades exploring the world with bright-eyed curiosity.

I also happened upon a Mom Blog called RaisingMyRainbow.  Its blurb reads: “Adventures in raising a slightly effeminate, possibly gay, totally fabulous son.”  Her son is 4 years old.  She writes with wit and whimsy and a very open attitude, chronicling how their family navigates what seems to be a mainstream suburban life with an emerging non-mainstream human being.  It seems very honest to me, no agenda, no axe to grind, no added drama, just very loving and willing to engage with what arises.

Super Kids (photo by Joe Griessler)

I am inspired by this kind of parenting, and I want this to be what I pass on to my children.  My own kids are already in their 20s, though.  But I figure it’s never too late to model something positive.  After all, they may be parents themselves some day.  My parenting models were quite limited.  Growing up in the 60s & 70s, I didn’t know one kid whose parents were divorced until I got to High School.  My dad’s own parents were divorced, but he never talked about that.  My best friend’s parents had been divorced from previous marriages, but that didn’t seem to impact their family life when I knew him.  I got the strong impression that there was a ‘right way’ and a ‘wrong way’ to do everything, and the ‘wrong way’ was to be avoided at all costs.  Consequently, I complied and conformed and walked the narrow way.  It wasn’t a bad response, but it wasn’t necessarily the right response or the only reasonable response.  The difficulties with my response became apparent as my circle of awareness widened.  Other people were living other responses.  Do I tolerate, embrace, include or exclude those people?  What if some of those people are my own children?

“There are as many different ways to be a Christian as there are Christians”, my spiritual adviser told me one day.  He was a former Jesuit priest, born in India, married to a former nun, both still very active in the Catholic Church.  I couldn’t have been more astonished.  My father would never have said that.  There are as many different ways to be a parent as there are parents.  Those ways may be judged according to certain values.  To make any kind of distinctions, you really have to look at those values.  Do you value conformity?  Okay, then call it ‘conformity’.  Do you value love?  Okay, then look very closely at what you think ‘love’ is.  Does love punish?  Does love shame?  Does love reject?  Do you value certain beliefs that you respect?  Why do you respect them?  Because someone told you to?  Because they support something you’ve experienced?  There are so many good questions to consider, but it’s hard to find a safe place to consider them.  As a parent, I felt attacked, judged and defensive.  Competition crept into my parenting way too much.  I own those as my issues, but I also believe the suburban environment supported that.  Parental support groups I was in may have effectively reinforced the competition rather than offered support.

Hindsight.  I was 22 when I became a parent.  I didn’t think about a lot of this stuff beforehand.  However, I have four totally fabulous children nevertheless.   I give them credit; I give me and my husband credit; I give the Universe credit.   In general, if I lighten up on my ego, I can avoid creating stuff that’s FUBAR.  Instill wonder, curiosity, creativity.  Play alongside the kids, and step back.  We are all learning and growing up together, folding rainbows into the process.

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The Rose

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I think I have a pretty active dream life.  I usually remember something of my sleeping hours upon awakening.  Perhaps that indicates the level of my anxieties and neuroses; I’m not sure.  Steve says he hardly ever dreams, and he thinks it’s because he is so aware of his conscious mind while he’s awake.  Well, fine for you, then.  I blink my eyes open and forget where I am.  I need decompression time every morning.  My dreams almost always include my late husband, who has been dead almost 4 years.  It gives me a rather fluid sense of reality.  Jim is real and Steve is real, they’re just never real at the same time, in the same place.  Is that weird?  Oh, probably.  I’m getting used to it.

The other thing I do in dreamland is sing.  I wake up singing a song, or with a song stuck in my head.  This morning, it was “The Rose”, a song Bette Midler recorded some years back.  I think I learned it from one of my kid’s elementary school music programs. The line I was stuck on went like this: “Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed.  Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.  Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need.  I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed.”

Now why in the world would something like that be dominating my waking transition?  I thought about that for a while.  Then I began to cry.  This is how I know when I’ve hit on some repressed emotion, some way that I think about myself that I don’t like to admit.  For some reason, I was associating with that tender reed, drowned in a river of love.  I was 15 when I met my husband, 21 when we married, 45 when I was widowed.  My youth was engulfed in loving him.  I don’t feel a great resonance with the bleeding soul bit.  Ah, but the hunger, the aching need; yeah, that gets to me, too.  I feel that for my kids as well.  I call it “yearning”.  I yearn for my kids all the time, no matter where they are.  It’s a visceral thing.  I once learned in a Bible study that there is a Hebrew word for God’s loving-kindness that translates to a verb form of the same word that’s used for a mother’s womb.  Womb-love.  God “wombs” us.  I “womb” my kids.  I also “womb” my dead husband.

Now the last line of that first verse, I will take exception to.  “You, its only seed” just sounds too exclusive and attached.  It doesn’t fit the scope of the rest of the song, either, in my opinion.  Second verse: “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; and it’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.  It’s the one who won’t be broken, who cannot learn to give; and the soul afraid of dying who never learns to live.”  Okay, you could probably guess that verse gets to me all over (see yesterday’s post).  Although, in my case, it’s the heart that once danced, the dream that once dared, the one who gave everything already who is afraid to live again and invest all that…again.  So, here’s the key change and the big finish: “When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring becomes the rose.”   At this point, I want to give credit to Amanda McBroom who wrote these lyrics.  Good job.  I love the idea of seeds beneath the snow.  It appeals to the naturalist in me, even though we STILL don’t have any snow this winter in Wisconsin.  I love the idea of hope and new life.  And this is where I get to re-write that last line in the first verse.  The seed of love isn’t a person.  It’s LIFE, life itself.

Steve and I were talking about this yesterday as we drove out to hike the Ice Age trail.  He was urging me, again, to talk about what I want in life, how I want to live, why I want the things I might want.  “Why do you want to have land and grow food?”  I want to nurture living things; I loved raising kids.  I loved because they lived.  I want to live life loving.  Whatever I do.  It’s a cyclical thing, the flower that comes from a seed and begets more seeds that become more flowers.  Life begets love which nourishes life…and so on.  Okay, maybe this is sounding like drivel to you.  There is something going on here, though, and it’s about a flow of energy passing from living thing to living thing, and some of us call it love.  I don’t like the idea of that energy being confined to one “beloved”.  That’s where I think I’m getting stuck.  I say love, it is a flower and all of life can be its seed.

There.  Sorry Amanda, but I have re-worked your song so that it fits my dreaming and waking life a little better.  Hope you don’t mind.

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Twelfth Night

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We have been experiencing some very unusual weather for January here in Wisconsin.  We have no snow, and it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  Now, we often get what I call a “January thaw”, but this year, it’s been all thaw and no freeze.  I worry about the polar bears further north trying to adjust to these conditions.  And while I’m sure that climate changes are part of the natural process, I can’t imagine that 7 billion people aren’t having an impact on this.

I did another training day at the Nature Center.  We were learning about winter tracking.  Well, there isn’t any snow to see tracks in.  But there’s mud and other evidence that critters are alive and well, even in winter.  I like the fact that Wehr Nature Preserve is a “passive recreation” area.  That means that we don’t allow jogging, biking, skiing, snowmobiling, or pets on the trails.  There are plenty of other places for that.   Believe it or not, though, my most exciting animal encounter yesterday happened at dusk at a city park, right near a noisy train track and a major through road.  In the stream by the sidewalk, this muskrat was heading toward his home with a bit of a root in his mouth.

I snapped this picture as he headed under the footbridge where I was standing.  On the other side, he swam about 8 more feet away and then disappeared under the water with a flip of his tail.  The underwater entrance to his burrow must have been nearby.  I was so excited to see him with his vertical tail rudder, just skimming happily through the stream!

And then, the sky….I couldn’t stop taking pictures.

On a night like last night, I could well imagine setting off on a camel to follow yonder light just because its luminescence compelled me.  It invites me to slow down and enter a silent world, removed, far off.   The traditions of the ancient festivals of Twelfth Night and Epiphany support an opportunity to view the world differently, upside down, where God comes in and shakes up our status quo, socially, politically, theologically.  Things are not as we suppose they are.  They are always changing, always new and more mysterious than we can fathom.  Time stands open for us to feel a great discovery.  “Aha!  There!  I see it!”  The great challenge is then never to put that experience into a box, or build a booth around it, a tabernacle or edifice.   Be stupefied and humbled forever.  And keep your eyes open for the next epiphany.

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After the Storm

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It’s incredibly quiet today.  The sun is shining, the chill breeze is tinkling the neighbor’s wind chimes, but there are no cars zipping up and down the street.  I can’t hear sirens on the Interstate or trains behind the county park.  The birds and squirrels have eaten the stale bread off the chair in the garden and are probably sunning somewhere out of the wind.  The homeostasis is peace.  The Christmas mania is undetectable.  Steve is tapping away at the keys in the office; I’m tapping away in the bedroom.  No one is speaking.  I have started reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies.  I go off to the West Coast of the 60s for a bit, entering another woman’s thoughts as quietly as I enter my own.  And then I lay the book down and gaze into the dazzling light at the foot of the bed.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you” is an appropriate refrain.  The sparrows have started chattering in the hedge.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”   The heater begins to purr in the corner.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”  It seems as silent as a blanket of snow, even though the lawn is still a dull green.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”  All is well.

 

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Who Could Ask For Anything More?

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Companions.  The gift of friendship, togetherness, to know we’re not alone.

Steve brought me breakfast in bed this morning.  I am having one of my cyclical let-downs, when I have wearied myself in contending with life and death and love and loss.  We were discussing E.M. Forster’s novel “A Room With A View” when this came on.  Hormones, of course, have everything to do with it as well.  Lucy Honeychurch gets “peevish” when she plays Beethoven, and I get “peevish” reading Mr. Emerson’s speech on life and “muddles”.  Steve gets Slavic and moody listening to Mahler, or perhaps he listens to Mahler when he feels moody and Slavic.  We are beginning to know each other’s moods better and better.  And I really believe we are lucky, blessed, in a state of grace in that we accept those moods and are not threatened by the most peculiar of them.  That’s why he’s my best friend.

I’ve never had a lot of friends, and all of my best friends have been male.  Maybe that’s because I grew up with 3 older sisters.  I am a little suspicious of females.  I have a feeling it’s because I compare myself to them far too much.  A sly competitiveness creeps in and makes me uneasy.  I pull away.  With guys, I don’t compare.   I can be ‘other’ and so can he.  It seems simpler.  It’s a mindset that should apply to females as well except for my own perverse insistence that it can’t.   Growing up, I played with a boy who was a year younger than I and lived two doors down.  We were best friends for 9 years.  We played in the woods across the street.  We played house and wedding, and he was always the bride.  He had older step-sisters who kept being married off, and I think he found that really enchanting.  I suspect he grew up gay, actually.  I Googled him and found out a few pieces of information that might support that assumption.  But it’s just an assumption.  I know for a fact that at least one of my high school boyfriends came out after we broke up.   What does that matter?  I suppose I enjoy creative, artistic, sensitive male companionship.   Jim was definitely my best friend as well as my husband, and that description could fit him, too.

Brother & sister and best of friends

Friends to suffer with your moods, enjoy the stuff of life, travel with you through adventures of all kinds.  Old friends, new friends.  Situational companions.  Steve likes to imagine how he’d be if he were stuck in an elevator with a few people for hours.  He would definitely skip the small talk about the predicament and enjoy a captive opportunity to get to know them really well.  He’s kind of intense like that.  Scares some people.  Yesterday, I saw a news video about a policeman who crawled under a bus to hold the hand of a 24 year old woman who was run over and pinned.  The photo of them together on the asphalt and his interview afterward just filled my heart.  I know what it’s like to be so afraid and to just cling to another person for the reminder that we are never alone in our fears.   We suffer together.  We are interconnected.  And if anything is God, it is there as well.  Presence.  Abiding.  Being with each other.  It is the ultimate ‘yes’ of living.  Which brings me back to Forster  and Mr. Emerson.  “In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:

“‘From far, from eve and morning/ And yon twelve-winded sky/ The stuff of life to knit me/ Blew hither: here am I’

“George and I both know this, but why does it distress him?  We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness.  But why should this make us unhappy?  Let us rather love one another and work and rejoice.  I don’t believe in this world sorrow.”  Miss Honeychurch assented.  “Then make my boy think like us.  Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes — a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”

Ah, Yes.  To love one another and work and rejoice.  Companioned.  Who could ask for anything more?