Patricia Wild

In Gratitude

[Jewelry store window, Palm Springs, CA; Thanksgiving, 2013]

Ahh, the holidays!

On the eve of the crazy-busy, I’m happy to have this little window of time right now —won’t be posting next week—to just for a moment give thanks:

Thanks for Mystery; for graced moments that can surprise and uplift and sustain us.

And Thank you, Dear Spirit, for the gift of family and for friends near and far— a special thank you and warm greetings to loyal readers of this site. (You know who you are!)

Finally, thank you for community, for where two or more are gathered to discern together: “What are we asked to do?”

Amen.

“God in the Hard Places”

[ Monday, in front of the Massachusetts State House just before a Mothers Out Front rally]

LIke many women these days, I am no longer a Woody Allen fan. But the director/writer got one thing right: It really is about showing up. So on a rainy and chilled day when I would have much preferred to stay home and play with my precious grand-daughter, I reluctantly donned my high-performance long underwear, my warmest clothes, my thickest socks and my rain gear and took the T downtown. A veteran of outdoor showing-ups since Vietnam—indeed, many of my clothing choices are strictly based on “Will it keep me warm and dry if I’m standing for hours at a vigil or demonstration?”—I understand how these things work: It’s all about the body count. So I knew I had to be counted.

Now, I have devout friends whose discernment process to test whether or not they’re really called is to ask: Is this act or choice hard? Challenging? Painful? Am I struggling? And only if the answer is “Yes,” do they trust they’re doing God’s work.

Makes sense, right? If doing God’s work were easy, maybe we’d all be doing it! And it’s hard to trust facile—like sending off, with just a few keystrokes, this or that petition to save this or that. (Let’s hear it for “AutoFill”) It’s too darned convenient!

However: My own compass telling me if I’m on the right spiritual path is: Am I overcome by unexpected joy? So I was not expecting a spiritual experience when I grabbed my umbrella on Monday.

I showed up. Sixty others did, too, an awesome and deeply moving turn-out for such a miserable day. Which, need I say this, filled me with unexpected joy!

That evening, warm and dry, when I got the news that the Senate defeated Tar Sands, I gave thanks for the millions who have ever shown up, “in snow or rain or heat or gloom of night,” to protest injustice, to witness against war.

Thank you!

Out of the Blue

[Harvard Square; reflected]

Sometimes it’s challenging to live in this part of the world. Like my son-in-law noted the first time he took the T—known as the subway in his NYC—”too many students!”

Sometimes it’s challenging to be perpetually surrounded by young men and women. Sometimes I get impatient. Sometimes I feel invisible. Or irrelevant. Sometimes I just get tired of college students.

But last night, walking under a smeary, bright, three-quarter moon, something happened. I’d just left myQuaker meeting when one person didn’t show up for a meeting I’d attended. And had spent much of the meeting both absorbed in why we were there and pretty sure that missing person was AWOL because I’d again forgotten to notify her that we were meeting and feeling really, really, really bad. Again. (Did I mention I’d done this to her once before?) And angry at myself. And old. (I make stupid mistakes SOO much more than I used to.)

As I walked across a broad, paved expanse of open space in front of Harvard’s Science Building, out of the blue a young man on a bike rode diagonally past me. (If I was going from a 6 to 12 direction on a clock face, the Science Building at 9, his route was from 10 to 4.) He rode, knees high and lost in thought, his hands in his pockets.

And I remembered how great it was as a kid to “Hey, Ma, no hands!” I remembered how riding my bike had been my first taste of autonomy; what an absolute thrill that was. I remembered being a kid. And, despite my anger and guilt, I remembered to be grateful.

PS: Turns out I did NOT mess up. Doubled gratitude!

TTP

“Trust the process,” a dear elder of my Meeting counseled years ago. (She was NOT talking about this year’s mid-term elections.) She meant the slow and meandering and often exasperating process Quakers go through during decision-making deliberations.

I’d like to add another couple of words to slow and meandering and exasperating. They’re the two words my writer friends and I use to describe when we’re in all-over-the-place yet in-the-dark, when we allow ourselves to become totally non-linear and illogical, to vacantly stare at our computer screen or a sheet of paper or the ceiling for whole minutes at a time to then, maybe, jot down one or two words or—Oh, Wow! —an entire idea and then to immediately delete whatever we wrote and jot down something else. Something completely different.

Noodling around.

Trust noodling around as a part of that decision-making process, too. Trust messy moments when right brains and left brains tussle. Trust that when your committee or group of business meeting seem to be going circles, that just maybe something quite amazing is about to emerge. (Or, yeah, you ARE just going around a circles! So trust good clerks or facilitators to make good judgments.) Trust that Spirit can be in those moments, too.

Trust the process.

“Both Sides Now”

Just got back from a Prison Fellowship meeting and although pretty tired, want to try to record what struck me so powerfully tonight.

PF is a group of men and women doing prison ministry (visiting prisoners, teaching in a prison, working on re-entry issues for “returning citizens,” etc.); most but not all of us worship at Friends Meeting at Cambridge (MA). Once a month we have a potluck meal together and then check in/listen to what others in the group are doing and struggling with. From time to time, we’ll work collectively on some project. (We started a bail and legal defense fund, for example.)

Here’s what I heard tonight (I’d had dental work just before our meeting so was unable to make my mouth work. So listened more than usual!): how we explored the problems and situations presented to us—confidential issues—from many angles. How about . . . ? What if . . . ? Could it be . . . ? Maybe they thought . . . ? Is it possible that . . . ?

Every month at a PF meeting, something happens that makes me think: “There is nowhere on God’s Earth I’d rather be than right here, doing just what we’re doing right this minute.”

Tonight that moment came when I realized how extraordinary the discussion I was listening to really was. Trying to understand someone’s else perspective and exploring ideas other than your own; these are NO Small Things!

“War’s Good for Business”

[Green Acre‘s peace flag, Bahai School, Retreat and Conference Center, Eliot, Maine]

“War’s good for business,” a member of my Quaker meeting commented a few years ago. For years, every Sunday, he has taken it upon himself to count how many people have shown up for meeting for worship. So by business, he means—with irony and with deep pacifistic conviction—the headcount of bowed heads during Vietnam or the Gulf War or—so many to chose from!

But, of course, there’a a darker truth to his observation. War is good for business. For the fossil fuel industry. And for companies like Textron, maker of cluster bombs,* and just a few miles away from my Quaker meeting. Once a month for the past five years, a few stalwart souls from my meeting, rain or shine or sleet or hail, worship on the sidewalk in front of Textron. [“Showing Up”] And one Sunday every October, Friends Meeting at Cambridge’s meeting for worship happens at Textron.

So, yes, this October, our country engaged in yet another war, I noticed that more people showed up at Textron to worship knee-to-knee than had attended last year. (My f/Friend noticed too, no doubt!)

For me this year, that outdoor worship—on a crisp fall day with October sun on my face, a nearby tree is full autumn glory, birds singing—was about “I must be about my Father’s business.”

How deeply I felt that call!

*This link is to an appalling article in today’s “New York Times.”

“This Is What The Living Do”

What the Living Do

By Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

“. . . Hallelujah by and by”

At the beginning of yoga class began last week, our teacher invited us to say a little about transitions and how that might be playing out in our lives. Although each of us had something different to contribute, that summer had ended and fall had begun was definitely a common theme.

It was a wonderful, varied, invigorating class so when it came time for savasana, I gratefully sank into “corpse pose,” the traditional ending to every yoga class, with every muscle in my body relaxed and my eyes closed.

Well, almost every muscle. Because as I lay there on my mat, aware of only my breath and the quiet, a set of hands firmly but gently pushed my shoulders against the mat as if to say: “You’re still holding onto some tension, there. Here! Let me help you release it.” And then, almost as though there had been a second pair of hands it happened so fast, a folded blanket perfectly cradled my head.

Here’s the thing: While I knew it had been Annie, my teacher, who’d performed these kindnesses, I had the eyes-shut-tight vision that, indeed, I was on my death bed and that someone, a daughter, perhaps, had eased my burdens and calmed my mind as I moved towards The Big Transition: my death.

Does that sound morbid? It hasn’t felt so. All week I’ve been grateful to be reminded that my remaining years on this precious earth, like the hairs on my head, are numbered.

Through A Glass Darkly

[The Bridgeport, Connecticut train station* through a dirty window]

Okay, I admit it: I only really clean house when company’s coming—and then I go crazy! (Although this Sunday, I did make peace with spiders. Or, rather, I found inner peace when I finally admitted that Spiders Will Always Win! NO Matter What!) So after the (temporary) cobweb removal and the dusting and vacuuming and scrubbing the floor but not yet exhausted, I gave my surroundings a critical, queenly inspection—and noticed late afternoon sunlight shining through a filthy front window. Quelle horreur! So grabbed the Windex and some paper towels and went onto my front porch to spritz.

Such greasy, black grime! It reminded me of childhood visits to my Bridgeport, CT grandmother and how within minutes of playing outside her house I’d look like I’d been rolling around in soot.

When I told my granddaughter about my filthy Bridgeport visits recently, she’d looked at me blankly. “Why was it so dirty outside?” “Because in those days, Bridgeport had big factories with big smokestacks that let out lots of pollution into the air.” Another blank look! (Maybe if I’d used the word “belched” instead of “let out” she would have gotten it. But maybe not.)

Sunday I gave some thought to the source of that grime and had to acknowledge—not for the first time but somehow freshly Real— that much of it comes from Somerville’s car-exhaust-filled air. I had to again acknowledge my home town’s obscene asthma and cancer rates (which, when all the other variables are accounted for, like smoking, can only be explained by Somerville’s proximity to Interstate 93 and its busy, congested streets.). And, yeah, even spent a moment or two contemplating the closed, rusting factories of Bridgeport and what happened to that community and its families when all those belching factories padlocked their gates. (It’s complicated, right?)

My Bridgeport grandmother, Lil, died from lung cancer. (She also smoked like Bridgeport factory.) Her great-great granddaughter, Lilian, is two. Anchored by these two, precious Lils, acknowledging the Bridgeport factory workers and their families and the present-day Somerville families struggling with health issues related to air quality I ask, “What am I called to do?”

* My mother and father met in another/earlier Bridgeport, CT train station in 1941.

“Worth It”*

Could there be anything more perfect than hanging out with 400,000 of my closest friends on a perfect fall Sunday afternoon in NYC? Could there be any greater joy than dancing down Broadway, right behind a om-pah-pah band, with my precious four-year-old grand-daughter while holding a “JOBS. JUSTICE. CLEAN ENERGY” poster someone just randomly handed me? Or hearing thousands of young people of every ethnicity and sexual orientation, from high schools and colleges all over the country, call and respond: “Tell me what democracy looks like?” “This is what democracy looks like.” (Yes, it does.) People’s Climate March, indeed!

*What the sign my daughter made and carried said.

“Does anyone ever realize life?”

As I overhead a Niagara-on-the-Lake resident remark in July, at the height of her Canadian resort-town’s summer season: “Any day now we’ll all be talking about the polar vortex again!”

Sigh.

This glorious summer is coming to an end. Farmers’ market peaches are mealy and sad, now, for instance. Did I truly appreciate every peach I ate in July, in August? I wonder. And remember, as I always do when I ask this Did I Truly Appreciate XYZ question, that precious, poignant moment at the end of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town:

EMILY: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?”

STAGE MANAGER: “No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.”

I remember the first time I saw Our Town—sitting beside my mother at a small and shabby community theater in Lynchburg, Virginia. I was fifteen or sixteen. I remember, hearing the Stage Manager’s answer, promising to myself that night: “I will! I will always live my life, ‘every minute,’ with intention, with gratitude, with focus.” (If I’d known the word “mindfulness” I would have added it to my mental list. But I hadn’t. Not at that age. And not in segregated, conservative, sleepy Lynchburg.)

But I haven’t.

“The Great Turning”

As surely as sunflowers turn their faces towards The Light, we’re facing—Yes!— The Great Turning:

Praise be! It’s happening! [Please read “Branded #6: ‘The Drop Becomes the Ocean’ for more about Jay O’Hara.]

Let us give thanks.

Let us praise.

And let us, Friends; brothers and sisters, double our efforts!