Canada Saga 2009 August 24

"As for me, I know nothing else but miracles." (Walt Whitman) 

"Life will reveal answers at the pace it wishes to do so.  You feel like running, but life is on a stroll." (Donald Miller)

 

The temperature in the house, after a night of windows open and fresh air, reads a comfortably chilly 64 this morning.  Outside, the sun shines brightly in a crisp blue sky, and a preview of fall weather reminds me that the summer, with all of its plans and promise, is passing quickly.  The produce at the Farmers' Markets has changed from the tender young lettuce and peppers of June to the tender sweet corn and melons of an early autumn.  The September blueberries are already luscious in August, with their misty blue of perfect sweetness, tasting like mountain air and sea breezes with a hint of cedar.  Nights are shorter as sunrises linger over the Eastern horizon, shallow yellow tendrils creeping over the mountains to wrap light around the wonders of the morning.

 

 

I've been mostly housebound in those pre-dawn hours that I love so much.  A respiratory condition has kept me quiet, missing my wonderful doctor from summers past, who died suddenly last March.  But I remember his most important prescription: rest.  So I've made myself content with simply walking to the water of our little community, sitting on the steps, listening to the world breathe itself awake. Each breath at ocean's edge is an exercise in infinity, into the Divine breathing time itself, breathing the rhythm of the wind and the waves that gently cradle goslings, and float gulls on soft breezes as sea lions play offshore. 

 

The gentle pulsing tide reminds me of the moments I've spent with those at the edge of life itself, as they inhaled and exhaled into this very energy that breathes with me now. It's a wonder to me that the end of what we call life isn't an end at all.  "The opposite of life is not death," Eckhart Tolle tells us.  "Life has no opposite."  The wave breaks on the shore; the ocean goes on. 

 

And in the midst of it all, miracles and wonders spark all around us.  That we could be in New Orleans in the morning, and across the continent in Vancouver hours later; that we could see a snippet of a bright rainbow in billowing clouds from the window of the plane; that we could look down on the Straits of Georgia from our little puddle-jumper and watch patterns of ocean water looking like rows of a well-tended garden; that we could sail over the tops of cedar and pine trees at the edge of the Qualicum airport and feel we were home; that we could be welcomed by our good friends and share a warm and wonderful meal at the Final Approach airport restaurant where they knew what we wanted to eat and drink:  any one of these events, or any of the moments inbetween, for that matter, are worthy of a treatment on wonder and miracle.

 

As we left New Orleans, I prayed that I would have a quiet seat-mate, and ended up with a chatty over-sized young woman from Alabama who punctuated her honey-drawled comments with a periodic nudge on my thigh for emphasis. I tried to bury myself in my book, hoping she would take the hint.  I tried to inconspicuously shift, to move farther away. This elicited a concerned, "Oh, Sugah, do you have enough room?  Ah know Ah'm big."  The thoughts that arose were not pleasant or kind.  But slowly, as the hours went on, I heard her.  I heard her fatigue, her concerns about her 9 year old son whom she was home-schooling in rural Montana; I heard the depth of her caring for her father, sitting beside her next to the window, who had just lost his sister; I heard her pain and her guilt that she wasn't at the bedside of her favorite aunt when she died.  When I glanced at her sideways, I saw the tears softly falling down her cheeks.  And in one of those bolts of synchronicity that splits open the state of wonder and reveals the grace in the Universe when we pay attention, I heard her say that she had been a nurse before she decided to be a full-time mom, and eventually wanted to return to nursing and go into Hospice care. 

 

Hafiz must have had such moments in mind when he wrote, "O wondrous creatures, by what strange miracle do you so often not smile?"  Every encounter reveals itself in its own time as one with the Divine; we are either aware and present, or not.  Sometimes we are simply left wondering, with a vague sense of awe, and a smile.

Since we've returned from Louisiana, we have spent time with our friends from Colorado, who introduced us to this area.  We are all less likely now to run off upIsland, or hurry-up hiking old trails and looking for new adventures. We have a relaxed sense of being here now, enjoying each other's company and listening to stories of our children and the past year since we've seen each other.  Michael and Keith have had their annual fishing odyssey, and brought back more pink salmon than we'll be able to eat this summer, lucky for the neighbors.  They fish out of a lodge upIsland that was the childhood home of one of our favorite neighbors, and it was a delight to introduce our friends to each other over wine and 'appies.'  Tomorrow we'll drive to Chemainus, a small colorful port town with a wonderful summer theater, for a matinee and lunch. 

 

"I wish I could show you," Hafiz continues, "when you are lonely or in darkness, the Astonishing Light of your own Being!"  If she could have seen her own loveliness in her pain, if I could have seen her loveliness even before she spoke, we would both have experienced the astonishing light of Being.  But this is how it happens: we are otherwise engaged, in a hurry, and all the while, the Divine "is on a stroll" through our lives.

 

When we slow down, when we keep pace with the unhurried breathing of a Universe always in amazement, we, too, 'know nothing else but miracles."

YAY GOD