Those Five Days - Reflections on Summer Solitude 2017

Waking to stillness.

                No wind yet moves the water, the trees.  Just silent golden  sunrise tipping over so slowly 

                 into the bay.  My soul smiles itself awake, stretching.

Then the birds.

                So glad, always, for a new day.  The jenny wren lets me know how beautiful this one is      

                already.

Maybe a beaver.

By now I am outside, trying to pretend I’m not intruding.  As if I was invited.  Making no sound.  On the deck, drinking my tea.  Drinking the hush and holy of this moment.  But one movement, ever so slight, and down he goes, slapping.  

Dawn gives way to full out morning.

And the breeze flirts with the water’s surface, and on my skin.  And nothing’s pressing.  I can stay here, like this, all day.  And I know it in the morning, and that true thing shapes everything all day.  And mostly, because it’s still season-early, the only noises made by a human are made by me.  And I’m careful about things like that.  And so much rest and grace can be breathed in when it’s quiet like that.

Joy-Work is what you call it.

When it’s meaningful and fascinating, and it still counts somewhere (back in that other life).  Reading and considering and writing things down and ideas and a mapping out of those ideas.  Joy-Work is what you call it when it can’t be interrupted, and when, upon it becoming even the least bit tedious or when the ideas stop flowing, you just put it away.  But if they don’t you can be engrossed – for a long time – and it’s okay.  Like that.

Humility is what you call it.

When the nap is taken seriously, as something holy.  And upon waking the needs of a ‘seasoned’ body are also addressed with the on-purpose engagement of muscle and beating heart; in the water, on the water.  And oh the luxury of the late afternoon shower.  And the ritual of meals easily observed in the privacy of this little table beside my chair, where there’s no convenient drive-through or awkward luncheon or forgotten salad to sabotage my good intentions.

And stillness circles back.

The sun in no hurry, hangs low above the trees.  The bullfrogs are all for it now, and the loon, haunting and beautiful, declares the day a huge success without having checked off one thing on a list.

Enough-ness is what you call it.

When in the cycle of days, maybe five in a row, that begin and end with stillness, there is the awareness of a Presence that makes everything enough again.  Every failure, emptiness, disappointment, criticism, dismissive conversation, real or imagined --  every way the whole wide world does not seem to want to accommodate my ‘agenda’ to be validated – it’s still there, it still happened, but it doesn’t matter anymore.  .

Because in this kind of stillness I can hear another Voice at last,

whispering divine affirmations, and a longing for this time, as much as I have longed for it too.

And He is Enough.