dance

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

I have a new routine.  Now I’m not exactly sure how long you need to be doing something before it becomes routine, but 2 weeks is habit enough for me.  Within the initial stages of waking up, I walk into my kitchen that is more of a storage unit than kitchen, and pick up my favorite mug.  Sometimes it’s found dried and stacked neatly in the cabinet, others it is clean and waiting patiently on the drying rack, but usually it’s exactly where I put it the previous day of my routine-the sink.  It is one of my treasures from the many yard sales I’ve scavenged in my day.  In this instance, however, the seller was also the creator.  Handmade on a potter’s wheel with the signature 'Beth' on the bottom, it was sculpted with simple imperfection, decorated with a sky-blue basil glaze and speckled black, ridged for the thumbs to worry themselves away, and like a tree, its stained dark inner rings prove its long life. 

 

With the sheer stupidity of how fabulous it feels in the mornings this middle of August, I bear the warmth of coffee as my fingertips cusp together around my cup, and walk outside.  My destination has been, in this two-week routine, on the backyard stairs that go to the upper level of our quad complex community building of love, and without bug repellent.  And there I sit.  I would say that my sitting is in silence, but that’s not exactly true.  You see, my thoughts begin as loud interruptions that sometimes become a more peaceful hum and hopefully, eventually, merge into prayer.  For example, in my small head and breath of a life I have felt absolutely sure of certain things - the past 6 months, in particular - that have crumbled before my eyes and pierced my wounded heart [loudness].  That sureness then evolves into the recognition that nothing tangible can be truly defined, encased, known in absolutism [hum].  And because God is good and his grace is more constant than my hums, those noisy thoughts somehow become more of a recognition of how the reality of Christ’s atonement and the presence of his ultimate reconciliation supercede my desires for earthly confidence and knowledge [prayer].  It is at this point, when the mystery of God covers all the earth including my small head and breath of a life, that I can see with new eyes and hear with new ears.

 

And so I then see the garden that decorates our yard in the middle of what some may call a ghetto (I think it’s more politically correct to think of it as the perfect location for a quad complex community building of love), the coop that houses our 13 baby hens who are blossoming into young ladies, and a haven of brush that our neighborhood kids refer to as ‘forest’ and is bordered by the old train tracks and a drainage ditch.  And then I hear the birds as they eat from the feeders, our ladies clucking as they jump on top of one another and peck away at grass and bugs, and the rather obnoxious traffic of planes as they make their way northeast of the airport.  I look up, ask them to be quiet, and wonder if they can see what I see. 

 

When I was young and played basketball in my family’s backyard, I would always do fancy hook shots, lay-ups, and 3-pointers when I heard the bustle of airplanes traveling northwest of the airport.  I would wave after my impressive moves and say hello to the passengers.  Then I turned 12, flew on one of those planes going North for the first time, eagerly took a window seat with my face pressed against the pressurized glass in hopes to see other kids hit a reverse lay-up and wave back at them, only to realize that you can’t see jack from up there.

 

Even now, however, I hope that just one person can look down from such heights, see beyond the endless patterns of green grass and white rooftop, and understand the harmony that exists in our backyard—a bird’s eye invitation to a peculiar existence.  Maybe, if such a magnifying glass was magnified enough, they could have seen the performance of two days ago. 

 

It was just like every other morning of the past few weeks with my coffee and my mug and my recognition that all things rest in the palm of God’s love, that I saw a leaf spinning in midair.  On the edge of our brush/forest, stand a few older, taller trees that are still covered with green leaves until later this fall.  From my step I saw this odd movement beyond the garden and chicken coop.  At the time there were no planes and the girls were being rather quiet, so the gentle wind that twirled (and it actually twirled) this leaf 15 feet from its home base of a branch, held strong by one singular thread of spider silk, was its own soundtrack to nature and all things beautiful. 

 

Moments of awareness are a craving of mine.  I search them out; I climb mountains and get lost in the woods to seek their presence.  But it is in the most unexpected and unusual times that they occur.  That seems fitting in the over-arching narrative of the good news: exist where it’s least expected to exist, redeem those who’re least expected to be redeemed, honor those who’re least expected to be honored, and shine where it’s least expected to find a city on a hill. 

 

And so it is that a leaf danced in the backyard of Binghampton, and brought illumination to the pierced holes of my wounded heart.