Sacred Summer
(Having been consumed the past few weeks with presenting at the Women’s Leadership Conference, this month I am dipping back to the Soul Matters archives, Summer, 2012. I hope you enjoy.)
Two weeks ago my daughter and I had a nasty little tumble from my bicycle, plopping us rudely onto 3rd Street and leaving us battered and bruised. Being five, Sophia recovered at the speed of light. Being some decades past five, I am still purple and in pain.
As with all trauma, pain offers the difficult blessing of causing one’s world to become incredibly small. All the details and to-do lists evaporate and life slows to a centered simplicity, as in, “Let’s see if I can manage to lie down without crying.”
It was in just such a state of limitation that I lay down under our century-old apple tree on a recent, glorious, afternoon. The breeze was soft, the leaves luminous against the blue sky. I listened to bird song and watched our resident titmouse swoop down onto a branch, caterpillar in beak, eying me carefully before darting into the hole from which persistent cries of invisible babies emerged.
It was a strange juxtaposition to be in such pain and simultaneously so enraptured by the beauty around me. I already spend much of my time appreciating the beauty of Life and thinking about the essence of things. But, true to human nature, I can easily become derailed by details: what I’ll make for dinner, the article that’s due, money, health, work… the usual litany of the mundane.
My engrained pattern is to get everything done before I lie under the tree. I can too easily fall prey to the Martha Stewart-borne sickness of, “if you have time to sit down, you have time to crochet a rug” sort of insanity. But the crash brought me down to earth, literally and metaphorically. Suddenly, making dinner and getting my article written gave way to lying under the tree and experiencing the sacred.
How very nice.
Despite—or because of—my pain, Life revealed a wholly (holy) wondrous experience, one I might easily have missed had I been in my usual busy blinders. Sometimes, smallness returns us to Essence.
I read a book once that I purchased solely based on the title: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. It was about a woman who was hit by a sudden, mysterious, and completely debilitating illness which left her bedridden. A friend brought her a snail in a terrarium, and this wee creature became her companion, facination, and teacher through her weeks of solitude. Smallness (quite literal in this case) brought her back to Essence, to the sacredness in the ordinary.
Sacred is related to holy, which has a root meaning, “that which must be preserved whole or in tact.” The sacredness of Life is destroyed when we separate matter and spirit and begin to treat them as two distinct things; worse still when we begin to value the former over the latter.
“Miracles,” the recognition of the sacred in everyday life, occur when we turn our interest and attention to the here and now, when we shift our values. (Good-bye, Martha, Hello, Buddha.) If we get thrown off our bikes enough, the overvaluation of efficiency and activity can give way to attention and interest, creating the foundation for a meaningful life.
Miracles abound. Seeing them is really a matter of attention. All you need is to have your eight-year-old ask you how particles make you grow, or to watch a titmouse in an apple tree to realize that it’s all miraculous and that you really can’t explain it. Moreover, you don’t need or want to explain it; you just want to appreciate it. And that’s when a bruised shoulder, or a broken life, becomes whole again.
Kate Ingram, MA, is a counselor, coach and award-winning author who still spends time under the apple tree watching the titmice. Her newest book, Grief Girl’s Guide, was just awarded a Nautilus Silver Medal and is available here. To discover more of the sacred in your own life, go to kintsugicoaching.com or write kate@kintsugicoaching.com.
