When you dare to be happy

Photo by David McSpadden

At Dayspring last Friday night, we entered the Great Silence after dinner, around 9pm. We kept it until 10am Sunday morning. In between, we could walk the lovely grounds, journal, read, pray, sit, eat, sleep, anything as we felt led. But we could not speak.

*

Me and silence, 2000 to present:

For a time, music was my silence, my retreat, my freedom. No words needed to explain myself, no people to explain myself to. Just me and eighty-eight keys in a small soundproof room, playing it out.

During a day of silence last fall, I breathed for the first time in a month. Then, I scribbled anger and disappointment at myself, all over my journal.

I am the awfulest person in the world at getting up in the morning. But just before dawn (especially in early spring) is my most favorite time to be silent, alone, alert.

Once on a technology fast, I experienced road rage such as I have never experienced before, until I pulled over to the side of the road to eat a peanut butter sandwich and make growling noises--yes I am that insane--since I couldn't turn on the radio to tune it out.

Silence is boring. Silence is edifying. Silence is restorative. Silence is terrifying. I crave silence and run to escape it all at once. In silence, I see God. I see beauty. I also see myself.

*

I came to Dayspring expecting something. Something angry, and difficult, and cathartic. Something with tears and a rehashing of old disappointments warring within me and (just maybe) a profound new insight that would change everything. I came in expecting that the silence would be, at its core, hard work.

So, anticipating the hours ahead, my first task when silence began was to read over every journal entry I've written since I started divinity school. It only took about 20 minutes. There weren't many, The entries there were consisted of wrangling and wrestling and anxiety and questions. Questions about how to approach my vocation, my marriage, my spiritual life, my relationships. How to process the painful things in my past.

God, I know I can't handle all of it this weekend, so please guide me to what it is you want me to wrestle with.

In the morning morning, after a deliciously fresh breakfast and a run through forested country roads, I was lying flat on my back, stretched out in the cool hallway when it struck me, clear as day, clear as the title of the weekend's program: "The Gift of Divine Time."

This weekend is not for you to wrestle. Having named the questions and anxieties last night is enough. Now, let go--not in avoidance or denial but in trust--and commend all into the hands of the Spirit. Now, simply enjoy. This silence is for you a gift.

*

Something shifts, and I am in the present.

It is a gift that I am here. The sun and the woman in the rocking chair next to me on the porch and the rain and the bed and the fresh food--all is gift.

It is a gift that I am asleep by ten.

It is a gift that I am here in community without needing to explain myself, to worry over my words. I confess I may enjoy people more when we can simply be together, no words.

It is a gift when the storm hits Saturday night, and I am sitting on the porch looking out at the lightning and the rain that has blurred my vision of the horizon and the wind that is making the trees sway violently. I startle when the first tree branch falls, but then I grin, glee splattered over my face as the wind blows the rain under the porch and against my skin. I stare down the storm until it passes, and retire for the evening.


It is a gift that I am running on these rolling hills just before breakfast. I don't want to turn around, I want to keep going, but I know my knees and I know my lack of fitness and further I know that there is more gift--scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, a cinnamon raisin bagel--all waiting for me back at the lodge.

It is a gift that I am for the first time walking a prayer labyrinth, like an interior pilgrimage toward God, and it is a gift that the spider on the porch is spinning her web, slowly, deliberately, in concentric circles, like a labyrinth.

I take in all the gifts, and somehow in taking in the gifts I feel all that is un-gift begin to unclench in me. It is not gone. There is work yet to do. But it is unraveling, and I think maybe it has even been instructive. I think maybe I am learning from this silence to be present in each step of the journey, to trust that I, even with all my noise and junk and wandering--am on a path with God.

It is a gift that I am sitting before the lily pond where the geese go for rest, and I am reading over and over Mary Oliver's "Morning Poem" (look it up) and she is telling me that notwithstanding my sometimes-leaden spirit there is "somewhere deep within you/ a beast shouting that the earth/ is exactly what it wanted" and she is challenging me to dare to be happy, to accept this as gift, to love the earth and the community and the place God has given me.

For this moment, at least, I wholeheartedly do.

*
(An appendix)

Labyrinth
You will have entered, perhaps, with joy.
On a sure path to the center.
You will wind and double back enough times you feel
you might have returned to the place you started,
as though moving backwards.
This only means you are in the thick of it.
Then one day, having relaxed into the rhythm of your steps,
perhaps without noticing it--
you will find yourself there.

Where? A rock, on which is laid a feather, a stone,
some broken pottery.
It is not, perhaps, what you expected to find here.
You find yourself looking outward, at all that impelled you.
From the rock, it appears beautiful.
You want to run to it.

Wait.
Close your eyes, breathe in gratitude.
For waves of green. For each bird
chronicling your journey.
Each stone leading your path.

Then, a moment after it has been too long,
you will begin the slow journey out, which is
perhaps the most important part.
And when having made your final turn,
you find in your pocket the tiny shard
of pottery, you will understand that you
must turn toward the center
again.

Autumn in Cherokee

Autumn has blown through Cherokee. It came so quickly, now the leaves are almost gone. And with autumn has come fresh, crisp air.

Maybe it started with running in the mornings, beating my body on the pavement at my least favorite time of day, with a couple local ladies. Getting to know them a little. Coming to find that I like being up early, when there is time to pray and wait for the light.

Or it started when I got assigned to teach the night GED class. Which I disliked at first because on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I come home from morning GED class around 3. I lie on the couch like a zombie until 4:30 catching up on TV, then drag myself off of it and head back for evening class. But then, it’s such a good class. Molly is the first student who has ever told me she enjoyed the Sylvia Plath poem, and she writes beautifully, and I wonder if I might just graduate my first English major. James is 65 and has worked his whole life as a carpenter and wants to get his GED just to see if he can—and he can. Ashley and Jake are so young, only 16 and 18, and it’s only when Ashley writes her essay I find out their baby daughter has cystic fibrosis. They are going to get married, and the world is stacked against them, and I want them to beat it so badly.

Or it started with this writing project. When I decided to write only the things I want to write, the stories that are inside me and want to be told. My marriage. My faith. My family. When I started collecting stories about my Grandfather who died earlier this year and writing them down for the family. When I connected with people through this writing.

Or it started when I went to seven weddings and a funeral this summer, and I started missing the feeling of being home.

It starts in a lot of places sometimes. Sometimes that’s the only way. But then one day I wake up and realize this might just be called joy.

And suddenly I have a new fear: not of plodding through this next year hazy, but of leaving yet another place I have grown to love. Grown to love slowly and skeptically and with many asterisks, sure, but nonetheless—yes, I must name it—grown to love.

It’s not a straight path, of course. This doesn’t mean I won’t be lonely again, couch-ridden again, resigned to anger again—this year, probably even this month.

But for the moment, I roll down the road playing my music and gawking at the blue sky and the orangey-red trees and the sparkling river and I feel amazed at the beauty of it all. I feel desire and drive and purpose and I revel in it, because it seems like it’s been so long. And it is a gift.

A change in perspective

Sometimes it is a gift. Sometimes it is a discipline, of counting items for gratitude, or praying to see the good. Sometimes it comes from the vulnerability of others, helping us open a chord inside ourselves.

Three years ago, I taught adult literacy through Americorps. I complained the whole year about the commute, the frustrating nonprofit bureaucracy, the lack of support, the lack of income, the "unorganized" (or just non type-A!) people I worked with. In May, I had a dream, about my co-workers going through tough times. I really had to be there with them. There was a strange intimacy and compassion to the dream. It had no basis in reality, but I woke up feeling the urgency of loving people. You never know what they might be going through. I went to work and it felt so meaningful--every interaction with a student or co-worker, every opportunity to show people they matter. We had an end-of-the-year ceremony for the students, and they were so proud of their accomplishments. Suddenly I had a 180 degree shift. I loved my job. I decided to stay another year. And sure, over the next year there were moments I felt stressed, but the love for my students and staff never dissipated.

We can wake up one day and see the same thing in a totally different light. Lately, it is my task to search for the different light. Practice seeing it, and one day, suddenly, wake up full of joy and wonder and anticipation of the great love that suffuses the world.

It is in the small things: I was angry I had to pay more money than I had anticipated, to run in a weekend long relay race. I had to give up sleep, spend the whole weekend with people I didn't know too well.
But as it unfolded: On the first day the pouring rain washed out any inhibitions or complaints and we saw how far we could push ourselves, and on the second day the sun came out and the early spring red buds sparkled and after 3 miles the uphill gave way to the most beautiful mountain vista I could imagine and I said aloud to myself, "That was worth it!"

It is in the big things: I had to move away from my family and community and job, put my dreams on hold for two years, because of my husband's job and career.
My neighbor put it this way for me a few days ago: I can enjoy my marriage in the mountains and rivers and trees with little stress or work. I will write and listen and grow a garden and learn what's inside me.

And in the life-and-death things: Grandfather is leaving us; my last grandparent is no longer alive, a frightening reminder of decay and mortality. Only one generation now separates me from death. And we will miss him.
Or the way it really is, the way that spirit and love and community have confirmed for me this weekend: he lives, he has crossed to a realm of pure love and joy, a realm he sought his entire life and longed to be in. And we will be united again.

There is to everything a light and a dark side. And both are real. But I am convinced the light side, if we can see it, is the more real.