Spirituality – Laura Stavoe

July 31, 2020July 31, 2020

Being Here

Tending to Endings (thirty)

Last Thursday John and I slipped inflatable kayaks off the bank into Marsh Creek and the rain came pelting down. We were paddling a couple miles of water to the camp we had saved for our family gathering. Our kids would arrive the next day and we were floating this section hoping it would be tame enough for the grand girls to paddle over the weekend, and also, a bit of adventure for ourselves.

Marsh Creek which borders the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness has long been a magical place for me. The first summer we were together, John and I paddled this stream during higher water, stuffing tents and food and sleeping bags into our hardshell boats. We slept at Big Hole camp where creeks converge to become the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. It felt right to return to this water nineteen years later during a year filled with so much tumult and change.

The current of river beneath my boat has a way of bringing me to the place my body is. The water this late in summer is sometimes only ankle deep. I needed to pay attention to avoid perching the boat onto rounded stones or careening into the marshy grass. About a mile into our float thunder rolled through the mountains and echoed throughout the valley. The sky darkened; the air cooled; rain fell hard, turning the surface of the water into a percussion instrument. I let my boat spin in the current, the rain fall on my face. I could breathe.

We were about a mile into our float when the rain made a new, more rapid sound. White pellets gathered in the current. John and I yelped and then broke into laughter as we paddled through the hailstorm, our skin stinging, our bodies leaning towards the deepest channel, eyes squinting towards shore, looking for camp.

I was not laughing when we left town early that morning. I was weary and unsure whether we should even hold our family campout. One of John’s daughter’s and her husband decided to stay home due to Covid concerns and we didn’t blame them. We would be outside, but still, there were fourteen of us (now twelve). Boise’s cases were surging and hospitals, filling.

Also, George, a close friend of ours and a mentor to John was in the hospital having suffered a serious heart attack only days before. He had been without oxygen for ten minutes before his wife, Melinda, found him and gave CPR. He made it to the hospital where the doctors induced a coma. Given the amount of time he was without air, doctors did not offer much hope for recovery.

It did not seem right for us to be out of cell range during such dire times.

Like so many decisions, lately, this one felt confusing and ethically fraught. Whether to camp, whether to march, whether to go for a walk with a friend, whether to support schools opening or staying closed.

I didn’t even know what to write for my column, not because I was out of ideas but because a foundational premise for Tending to Endings is that sometimes the difference between a tragic end of life and a difficult but beautiful one is in the intimacy that comes from paying attention to one another. It comes from community.

But, how do you show up for each other when hospitals must institute no visitor rules in to keep Covid from spreading and family who are primary caregivers must isolate to protect the fragile health of those they care for? My blog was one more place I felt ungrounded and confused.

There is a tendency I have to want to skim the surface of life during chaotic times. As though I can skip over the hard part without feeling it, like a stone skittering across the surface of a lake. I can tell when I am living this way when I have the sense of my life being on hold until things change, presumably for the better. It feels like half living.

We did not cancel the campout. We let Melinda and other friends know that we would be in the mountains for a few days, but we would be back and ready to help in whatever way possible on Sunday. We dropped a note and a jar of apricot jam on their doorstep. We continued to pray. All of it seemed so flimsy in the face of so much.

That night, the rain paused while John grilled steaks over an open fire and we set up our tent on the bank. The moment we pulled our sleeping gear into the tent, the clouds let loose again with a ceaseless rain.

Throughout the night, John and I woke again and again to the world brightening in a flash of light, our hearts thumping in the pause, thunder cracking and rolling through the land. The rain drummed on bark and leaves and ground and our dome of tent. Beneath it all was creek song. We slept cradled in earth and each others arms. It was a spectacular storm that that lasted until morning.

The crew at the trailhead. Caroline and Gabe ran up the mountain from the other side.

By the time the kids arrived that afternoon, the sun burned off the fog and the air felt clean. Still, true adventures rarely run smoothly. Saturday we planned a two mile, family friendly hike up to an alpine lake. Only after we passed the three mile mark and the trail continued to rise over another ridge, we pulled out the GPS and learned we had .8 miles more to go up to 8400 feet. We had underestimated the climb by half.

We hadn’t brought lunch. Knees ached. Stomachs growled. Everyone was tired and cranky. John and I split a measly Lara bar that bragged on the wrapper about how little it contained. The grand girls ate their Pringles before they made it to the top.

Just about the time I was ready to nap by the side of the trail, I heard the loud whoops ahead and Tesla came rushing back down towards us, her eyes sparkling.

“Worth it?” I asked.

“So worth it!” she waved us up the last few steps. “The lake is huge!”

Before long, John and Dylan were catching cutthroat one after another, and Jay was cleaning fish and starting a fire. We scooped tender white fish off the warm rocks with our fingers. We filtered water from the lake and refilled our bottles. We swam in the cool water and lazed on shore. We reveled in abundance, in serenity, in togetherness.

Brains are excellent for some kinds of knowing: science and data and insights based on prior experience. But for me to feel whole, or even, if I’m honest, to get through a day well, I also need intuition. Maybe you call it spiritual guidance or energy or flow. For this kind of knowing, as my friend Louise says, I need to be where my feet are.

I don’t always have to get to wilderness to drop back into my body, but it helps. I know which way to lean by paying attention to where I am, not only with my head, but with all of me.

It was a beautiful four days. Once we were in the wilds, I never questioned our decision to camp. Not because I knew we were completely safe, but because I felt connected again to the whole of things. Intuition and spiritual reliance do not promise error-free living. Only that it will be life; and nothing will be wasted.

When we arrived home tired and happy, John pulled up his email. There was a message from George who was very much alive, and able to write at length about his adventure. The subject line read: Your prayers helped/I got out of the hospital last night! George was home. We could hardly believe it.

He began by writing, “I don’t want ANYONE to feel they did not have a part in my continuing to live.” He listed the doctors, the friends who showed up, the ones who left voice messages, the 911 operator who guided Melinda through CPR and reassured her she was doing fine. He was brimming in that very thing I was so sure was missing during this Covid time–that feeling of community, of being loved.

Nothing was fixed in the world after our trip. Well, maybe George. But he, too, will have a long recovery. We will be here to help in ways that will feel flimsy and far too small.

Maybe that is the biggest illusion when I get ungrounded. That the small things don’t matter and aren’t worth doing in the face of impending tragedy or global crises or systemic injustice. In the face of perpetual uncertainty.

How many times have I learned they are exactly what matters? A day, a heartbeat, a step. I just don’t get to control when or how or in what way they matter. A spectacular storm in the mountains reminds me: of course I do not carry this world on my shoulders. And it would be silly to think that was the point. I keep showing up with my kind note, my little story, my jar of jam. It’s how we weave a cradle for one another. How we know, we are all here.

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June 26, 2020November 12, 2020

Listening to Land

Tending to Endings (twenty-six)

I am from the forsythia bush,

The Dutch elm

Whose long gone limbs I remember

As if they were my own…

George Ella Lyon, Where I’m From

A few weeks ago in a story circle I was asked to share a story of my ancestors and I was embarrassed that I felt stumped. I feel very connected to the family stories of relatives I know. But going back before my grandparents’ generation, what I have are anecdotes that may be true or may be lore, a few names, and at least six mostly European countries to draw upon. The stories I have do not quite feel like my own, and I have not yet made a point of learning more.

I have been listening to Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer which on one hand does not seem to be a book about endings or end-of-life. But on the other hand seems to offer a view into the benefits of knowing the stories of those (human and nonhuman) who came before us. In some ways it is a reminder that lives never really end, they just get carried forward knowingly or unknowingly in the land and the people and the ways of what comes next.

Kimmerer gently and beautifully makes a case for forming a reciprocal relationship with land. She speaks from the perspective of scientist and storyteller and daughter of mother earth. She reminds me that place, too, offers us ancestors. She writes, “This is really why I taught my daughters to garden–so they would have a mother to love them long after I am gone.”

I don’t garden yet, though I hold out hope for myself. I know gardening was a meditative and community practice for my own mom. Every year she invited the fourth and fifth grade classes at a nearby school to help plant and harvest food in her backyard. My mom responded to birds and flowers and squirrels with the same way she responded to toddlers, with respect and love and joy.

Kimmerer writes,

Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.

And I think, yes, this is what I saw in my mother.

Even without a garden, I relate to the way Kimmerer speaks of the relational aspects of place and how loving places can connect us to the stories of those who came before us.

When John and I bought the house we currently live in it had only been owned by the couple who built it. Their names, Beryl and Otto, were carved into a wood plaque on the front porch. Their grandkids’ heights are still penciled on the wall of the garage next to sketches of sharks and dolphins. Both Otto and Beryl lived in the house up until they died.

I feel connected to this couple I only know through handwriting on notes next to utilities, their charming choice of light fixtures, the giant trees they planted that shade the yard from afternoon sun. The house they built in 1981 is sturdy and sound. They planted apple and cherry and walnut trees that blossom in spring and one apricot that shows off during a bumper year, producing more fruit than our family, friends, neighbors or visiting deer can possible consume. I think of Beryl and Otto often. I feel a kinship in our shared caring for this place.

When I would take writing workshops into K-12 classrooms through a non-profit arts program, I’d often share a poem by George Ella Lyon, Where I’m From as one of my no-fail writing prompts. It always brought forth student poems brimming with imagery that would make a parent or a teacher’s heart swell. This was true whether the writers were third graders from bright leafy neighborhoods or teenagers writing from the juvenile detention center or the kids living in migrant camps near the orchards along the Snake River corridor.

Kids would name the tree outside their bedroom, the tamales their auntie made, the butte shaped like a lizard sleeping against the horizon near home. They would name the the things their father always said, their own Imogenes and Alafairs, their grandparents’ scars. They were connecting to ancestors—human and nonhuman—with words.

Beyond my literal home, too, I have found this sense of belonging particularly in places where story is still present in the curve of the land. I feel it in the cave walls of wild river canyons, or walking through forgotten cemeteries, or coming upon an ancient dwelling in the cliffs of Southern Utah. It is not a blood connection that I have to the people or animals or stones. But maybe what Kimmerer names as kinship with the people who worked and walked and died before me. It is not an intellectual knowing; the earth hums.

North Fork of the John Day River circa 2008

Kimmerer’s philosophy on reciprocity and gratitude has brought to mind the custom that is gaining momentum of opening events by first naming the indigenous land on which they are held. It has made me think, maybe it goes beyond being a gesture of correction and respect. Maybe it is also an offering. A way for many of us to begin finding an entry point to a fuller story of where we are from.

I have not always leaned into the hard stories of the places I’ve lived. America has so much to grieve, to atone for, to heal. Sometimes I think, it is too much. Like a pandemic, like Alzheimer’s, like death. But that is my ego talking. That is fear and denial. Besides, Kimmerer’s writing reminds me, the stories of our past shape us with or without our knowledge or consent.

I have learned this from my own personal history over and over again, why would it not be true of our collective story as well? I have also learned that when I finally do open, I am never sorry.

Wendell Berry’s famous lines from How to Be a Poet have always rung true for me:

There are no unsacred places;

There are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

Now I think, though, that maybe all places are both. Humans inhabit this earth sometimes by force and sometimes by carelessness and sometimes by heart. I want more heart.

More Resources

I’ve begun talking about this time as my accidental sabbatical as I’ve been spending a lot reading! The books below are ones that have given me a fuller view of where I am from. Some of them I have mentioned in earlier posts as well.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson

Stamped from the Beginning: A Definitive Guide to Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendri.

An American Sunrise: Poems, Joy Harjo

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations with a Nez Perce Elder, by Horace Axtell with Margo Aragon

Next week I will share what I learned from the surveys. Thank you so very much for the thought and heart you put into those! I’m very excited. Feel free to continue to send feedback to laura@laurastavoe.com in the meantime, or anytime.

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April 24, 2020June 14, 2020

The Marrow

Attention is the beginning of devotion. –Mary Oliver, Upstream.

Tending to Endings (seventeen)

Last Saturday my twin sons turned twenty-five. I don’t think about my pregnancy story as often as I used to, but during this time of isolation and uncertainty when most of us not on the front lines have orders to stay home (which feels both difficult and not very heroic), it has certainly come to mind.

The boys were due on May 17 of 1995 and I went into preterm labor on January 29, far too early. Their father, my husband at the time, drove me to the hospital, and I was admitted and placed on an IV of magnesium sulfate, a drug that relaxed every muscle in my body to the point where it took effort to lift my hand or move my leg. Only my brain remained unaffected. I stayed aware, worried.

The nurses kept upping the dosage until I could no longer open and close my jaw, until it took effort to make myself blink. Until, finally, the contractions slowed. I watched the sluggish heartbeats of my sons, also affected by the drug, marking slow time on the monitor. I could not take my eyes off of this evidence of life.

It was early in February when I was assigned a home healthcare nurse and sent home with a pump to administer a different medication and orders to to stay in bed full-time. I had been a teacher and a coach and a triathlete. I rode hundreds of miles a week and and ran in the hills for fun. I stayed up late grading papers and planning lessons and creating events for my high school students. In those days, my self-esteem was very much defined by productivity and achievement. Staying in motion was my mental health strategy, the way I managed fear. Now, my babies’ lives were at stake and all I could do to help was to be still and drink water. I would’ve been far more comfortable being ordered to climb Mt. Everest.

I have thought about that time a lot during our Stay-at-Home order, which in Boise is in its 30th day. How impossible it seemed in 1995 to be still during a time that was so wrought with uncertainty. How necessary it was. How much I gained that I didn’t even know would be part of the package. I think of Thoreau, who, in Walden, writes about seeking that kind of clarity:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,…

Sometimes the woods come to us. In fact, in my case spiritual growth almost always shows up looking more like crisis or upheaval than like a pilgrimage or a quest. More like preterm labor or a pandemic.

Not that my days on the couch looked spiritual or productive. In many ways, I was a wreck. I couldn’t think of anything serious or important. I started and abandoned craft projects. I watched reruns of Northern Exposure and made it through most of alphabet-titled detective novels. I spent a lot of time trying not to worry.

But I also loved on my sons knowing this might be all we had. We counted off days waiting for hearts, brains, and lungs to fully form.

Each day, I lived on the couch with my palm on my belly. I held it there for reassurance that they were still with me and also because it was the closest I could get to holding them. I waited for them to kick and watched evidence of limbs move across my expanding skin. I told my sons stories and secrets and I sang them songs. I wanted them to hear my voice as well as my heartbeat. I wanted my sons to feel loved.

I think about the community I had surrounding me even in that isolation. The boys’ dad brought me news from work and pints of Haagen-Dazs. Friends would drop off groceries and piles of books. My mom flew in from Chicago for a few weeks and we played Scrabble nonstop. The kindness of others provided a lifeline from the outer world while I was preoccupied with this inner one. The womb of the living room, the womb beneath my palm. The babies and I, we were all gestating.

We made it 77 days. At 36-weeks, I was able to turn off the medication, and go for my first walk in three months, along the canal bank. It was a brisk sunny day, the cherry trees were blooming, and I was dizzy with the freedom of being outside. Also my belly was unbelievably huge.

That night, April 18, 1995, Gabe and Dylan were born and I was finally able to hold my sons in my arms. They had hearts and lungs and deep brown eyes and souls I already knew. They were able to come home with us.

I know no other way to get to the marrow without also tasting the fact of death. I don’t mean in the way of daredevils. I don’t need to brush up against danger to know life isn’t permanent. I need only to remember. And to pay attention.

Today my sons are twenty-five and I am fifty-five and all of us are here. Today, I hike up the hill behind my house and pull a deep breath into my lungs. I know that, in the words of Jane Kenyon, one day it will be otherwise. It will be cancer or Covid or Alzheimer’s or something completely unexpected. But today, I hold my palm to the earth. I am here.

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March 27, 2020June 14, 2020

Room for Grief

Tending to Endings (thirteen)

I welcome grief like it is some unknown beast growling on my front porch in the middle of the night. I lean hard against the door, wedge chairs beneath the handle, brace myself like my life depends on it. Grief slips beneath the kick plate, oozes in through the mailbox, enters my life and my body in ways I find confusing.

One afternoon after I returned from my mom’s Celebration of Life last spring, I met a friend at an Indian restaurant. Over the six months prior I had left my job of ten years, lived apart from my husband and close friends, and cared for my mom during her final months of life.

Even I knew grief was in order. But that doesn’t mean it showed up in ways that made sense.

At the restaurant, we had just made our way to the buffet line when a family joined us. Under normal circumstances, I would grin at the two-year-old who was hopping up and down in front of the naan making her shoes blink. I am a kid person.

But on this day I shot a look at the mom, expecting her to save me from plowing over the toddler. She remained oblivious, traveling back and forth in a very disorganized fashion narrating entrees to the older children who also moved every which way in front of the buffet. Then her husband jumped in line in front of me reaching over his daughter to grab his own bread and moving on.

I carried my empty plate back to the booth to wait so I would not yell at a two-year-old or her parents. It was not empathy that stopped me, but some niggling suspicion that if I unloaded, I would eventually feel embarrassed.

People grieve differently. Some people hike the Camino de Santiago or wail along a wall or build a huge sculpture in the desert.

I become petty and irritable. Or at least that is one sign that I am experiencing loss. Things that normally don’t bother me feel personal and important. Newly aware of the fragility and preciousness of life, I think I should be kind toward all. Instead am self-centered and afraid.

When the pandemic news began ramping up and we were beginning to recognize how our lives were changing, one of my friends posted on facebook, “Don’t forget to take time for yourself to ugly-stress cry.” I read it and thought, oh right, that.

We have lost jobs and school days and music festivals and sports seasons and symphonies and church and therapy and family vacations and retirement funds and graduations and weddings and funerals and coffee dates and the ability to go to the store without fear and hugs from grandchildren and a sense of security however illusionary it may be.

Of course, grief is in order. And it is in me, waiting.

A friend of mine often says, “Grief is not a character defect.” This is comforting and true. But sometimes my grief squeezes into shapes that look a lot like character defects.

I check the news obsessively though I know it makes me feel worse not better and it interferes with my ability to be present for people and for creative work. I am sharp with my husband even though he is a kind person and currently the only human I can hold hands with or sit next to or hug.

One upside of having just gone through a big life loss before this pandemic is that I became aware of my own grief cycle, or maybe more of an avoid-grief cycle. It looked something like this:

Do something productive, let’s say write a chapter of my book
Sense a wave of uncomfortable feelings arise
Pick up my phone and scroll through Twitter to distract myself from the feeling
Berate myself for being undisciplined and unfocused
Feel worse
Repeat

This happened a lot in the early months after my mom died. I was trying to write a book, and I knew time was short. At first I tried to fix steps 1-3, telling myself I needed to Be Present. Let myself feel. Maybe under normal, non-grief conditions that would work.

But not last year, and at some point I decided to just allow that my distractedness was part of my grief. Instead of focusing on being more disciplined, I decided to skip step four altogether. I would notice I was scrolling rather than writing, and I did not have to say one mean thing to myself about it!

In The Five Invitations, Frank Ostaseski writes about how we tend to think the inner critic is motivating us when it is actually getting in our way. He says, “It is neither a conscience nor a reliable moral guide, and it isn’t the voice of wisdom.”

When I skipped judging myself, I could also skip feeling worse. It turns out, four and five were very sticky steps. I got a lot more feeling and a lot more writing in when I let them go. Eventually I even finished a draft of my book.

My judgements–whether aimed at the toddler in a buffet line or my husband or myself–are almost always a futile attempt to regain control. Sometimes they are sneaky. When I say to myself, for instance, other people have it much worse (which is always true) it also carries an implication: Who are you to grieve? As though sadness is a limited resource with only so much to go around.

Today I am sad because my father is far away from family and close friends. The anniversary of my mom’s death is approaching and this is the first year in 57 that he does not have Jane by his side. We can’t fly to Hawaii because of pandemic measures and he shouldn’t return to Chicago until it is safer to do so. I am sad that my dad is alone during such a difficult time.

I have a friend who is caring for parents in much more dire circumstances than we are right now. I’m glad I know today that in order to be available for her, I must be willing to feel my own grief. It is the exact thing that helps me connect with others. It is the foundation of empathy.

Ostaseski writes,

The willingness to be with our suffering gives rise to an internal resourcefulness that we can carry forward into all areas of our lives. We learn that whatever we give space to can move.

Many years ago, my friend Debbie had just graduated from University of Arizona and was planning to join her beloved in Venezuela. She was saying goodbye to friends and packing while he had gone ahead to look for a place for them to live. Then Luis died in a car accident while helping his brother-in-law learn to drive.

Instead of going to Venezuela to begin a new life, Debbie flew there to meet Luis’s family and attend his funeral. As soon as she arrived relatives took shopping for black clothes. She dressed in black for the remainder of the trip. It was helpful, Debbie said, because no one expected her to be normal. Everyone treated her gently and gave her leeway, which was a relief amidst so much lost.

Everyone I know and everyone I don’t know these days is experiencing loss. We are not just in self-isolation, we are in mourning.

During these strange days I find myself walking on the trail with my heart full of love for the earth beneath my feet, for the hikers who smile when they pass, for the hawk circling over head. I am just so grateful to be here.

And ten steps later I want to swear at the runner who doesn’t say thank you when I move out of his way.

Then I begin the climb up the hill where I spot a stone that a child painted and left in a nest of grass. To Mom is penned in crooked letters, and I am standing next to bitterbrush weeping.

This is a lot to have and it is a lot to lose. I’m good with not being normal, for you too. No matter what shape grief comes, it seems wise to make room, to give grace.

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March 20, 2020June 14, 2020

Welcome

Tending to Endings (twelve)

It may sound strange to be comforted by a book about death during a pandemic, but I have been reading Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach us about Living Fully. I have returned to it morning and night during this last week when so many of us find our lives changing, and it has given me direction and comfort and hope.

The principles will not be new to anyone who has practiced Buddhism or a Twelve-Step program of recovery or studied Brene Brown’s research on vulnerability and whole-hearted living or who knows the tenets of acceptance, humility, and love from a wide variety of traditions.

What Ostaseski does is give generous personal context to the practices, using story to show how they hold even in dire conditions. He takes the hard stuff head-on and gives such relevant, poignant examples that I end up trusting his perspective and being reassured.

Ostaseski began his work with hospice patients in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. He founded the Zen Hospice Center in California, where he worked for thirty years. More recently, began the Metta Institute which provides education on spirituality in dying. Over many years, he sat with thousands of people as they approached death.

He writes, “I am not romantic about dying. It is hard work. Maybe the hardest work we will ever do in this life. It doesn’t always turn out well. It can be sad, cruel, messy, beautiful, and mysterious. Most of all it is normal. We all go through it.”

Death is normal.

This week I intended to write about hospice, but like so many things, visits have been halted where I have been training to volunteer.

The stories of loss that have been getting to me most lately have been the ones about care facilities on lock-down and the many people who cannot be near their spouses or family or friends. It has been reading about people in Italy who died in isolation and whose families cannot yet come together to honor and grieve them.

My impulse to write this blog and to pay attention to endings myself has in part come from my sense that it is important to be present for people during their final months and days on earth. To bear witness and to share those times. To usher people out of this world lovingly the way we usher them in upon birth.

But even births hardly ever go as planned. Dying, too, involves a great deal we cannot control. Ostaseski’s book offers a window into how to proceed with an open heart anyway.

I have underlined a great deal throughout the whole book, but it is the second invitation, Welcome Everything, Push Nothing Away, that feels most relevant to me this week. Ostaseski explains, “I cannot be free if I am rejecting any part of my experience.”

His personal stories are of his brother’s alcoholism and death, his own triple heart bypass surgery, being sexually abuse as a young teen. So, he really does mean everything. Or, more specifically, everything that already is.

Welcoming what is, as it is, we move toward reality. We may not like or agree with all that we encounter. However, when we argue with reality, we lose every time. We wast our energy and exhaust ourselves with the insistence that life be otherwise…Acceptance is not resignation. It is an opening to possibility. And openness is the basis for a skillful response to life.

In 2001, when anthrax was showing up in the mail and in the headlines, which happened about a month after the World Trade Center bombings, which happened soon after my divorce while I was still grieving and helping my young sons grieve, I had a teaching job that involved traveling to Southern Utah for a backpacking trip with a group of seventh graders. My own kids, kindergarteners at the time, were at home with their dad and I would be out of contact with them for five days. As we drove away from Boise in the vans, I felt vulnerable and uncertain and like the world might really be coming to an end.

At the trailhead, the teachers—four of us—cinched packs on awkward, seventh-grade shoulders, and the heaviest over our own. We walked into the desert among juniper and yucca, over red earth and beneath the clear blue sky.

The first night we slept on the rim of Dark Canyon, where we told stories from our sleeping bags and watched bright Orionids slip across the night sky. The next day, we found springs to refill our water bottles. We were in wilderness, so we took care to watch out for ourselves and each other and the organisms in cryptobiotic soil.

A couple of days into our trip while exploring Mule Canyon, we came upon the dwellings of ancient Puebloans, curved stone shelters shaped by people living more than a thousand years ago. It was impossible not to consider that these people, too, lived and drank from the spring and climbed the towers and slept beneath Pleiades. That the clay and the canyon and the sky had outlasted them, and would outlast us too.

I don’t know why humility reassures me during difficult times, but it does. What I felt in that moment was not that I was insignificant, but that I was connected, part of something vast and beautiful and whole.

When it came time to leave the canyon and we drove to the first small town where there was a gas station and convenience store, we saw the headline on the New York Times, “Twenty-one Senate Employees Test Positive for Anthrax.” It was jarring, but it was not everything anymore. Like the florescent light of the store, it outshone the sun due to proximity, not power.

Like most of us right now, I am unsure of many things. And maybe that is why it helpful to read something that reminds me good can come from not knowing. Ostaseski writes, “The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may also arise.”

All five sections of the book have been compelling, useful: Don’t Wait; Welcome Everything Push Nothing Away; Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience; Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things; Cultivate Don’t Know Mind. They have been an antidote to fear and a reminder that humility is not weakness. It is a way towards openness and possibility.

With love,

Laura

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