“...it is precisely contemplation that is turning me into a person with the capacity to attend to God and to God’s world! How can I become a person who pays enough attention that I might notice something and then act in response?”
I have been thinking often lately on the smallness of my life, and on the unassuming ways I can touch heaven in spite of my smallness. My life is nothing and everything.
The girls have been asking me lately if they can hold hands with me when it's time to go to heaven. It seems they don't want me to be in heaven without them, but I tell them I will go first and I will wait for them. I tell them they will find me. With moments like this, it's a wonder we are not all walking fonts of tears over the beauty of our bane existence. How can life feel so hard and so heavy, and yet so desired and so dance-worthy at the same time? It is mystery and it is mundane, and it is mine.
I was on a high-high on Halloween, enjoying the company of some of my best friends and of some of my newest friends. Our conversation was creation in real-time: telling each other our stories, asking questions, eating sweet potato chili, drinking a good bottle of wine, and letting our kids run wild in the dark outside. My heart was full because I tasted heaven.
And yet...I have struggled mightily since Saturday with existential-crisis feelings about homeschool. It feels like all of a sudden, my favorite shirt no longer fits. I try to remember how I got on this road, and I tell TJ I need a pep talk. I think about public school and tutors and also about being where I am. I listened to Emily P. Freeman's podcast, Episode 10, on being where you are, and cried in the kitchen yesterday.
She asked poignant questions at the end, my favorite being: What is the truest thing about you right now?
I love words, I said. God was for real when he said eternity is in our hearts, for there is not a limit to the depth of love I feel for words that work on me. I marinate in the words of writers I love, and in the Word as well. Words guide my imagination toward a life that is little but not lost.
I practiced Alice Cary's poem "Nobility" as I walked this morning.
Contemplation of words like these are medicine because they infuse a small life with value. It does mean something that I got up today and packed lunches and took Sailor to preschool and walked that hill and said a prayer and said a poem. Even if I am only a fly trapped in the kitchen and buzzing around a bit until the flower-shaped swatter ends the ordeal, I am happy to be a fly and to have a few minutes to see these views, with these people. I am happy to contemplate my life again this day and each day, to pay attention to my small spot in God's world. I might notice something, says Lauren Winner.
I might notice that being alive is a dream come true, and I can live it in Greenville, as it is in heaven, till the day I die.