Making Summer

 

Something about the expansiveness that is this new season (winter collapsed straight into summer; this is no spring, despite the calendar's persistence) is making me eager in a way that I haven't been for a very long time, and in that sense at least the dashing of expectations I didn't even know I had is priceless, for whatever hand it had in that. I'm off running again, since that's still the only thing I know to do when dealing with too much unmanageable emotion. But the funny thing about running is that, when you take yourself with you, you can't ever really go too far. If you're wildly broken, your path will be too. If you're wildly broken, you'll leave a trail of bloodied crumbled glass wherever you go.


"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." It has been my watchword in this pain, even in the blind moments [hours, days, months]. My goal in all of this--the nebulous nightmare-dream that is life--is not to dodge being hurt or somehow sidestep the bruising. Do I believe that there is some good in all of the anguish in the world? Inherently, no. Do I believe that something good can be made of it? Enough that I'm willing to stake myself on it; enough that I'm willing to sit through the grief and the emotional turbulence and the physical pain and the mental agony and work to fashion something halfway worthwhile out of all of the wrong.


On the wall beside the bunk I used in my mother's home, I taped a paper, by now long lost to diligent trash burning, and scrawled along the top was an old, oft-repeated prayer: "May this suffering bring compassion." Beneath it, in much tinier letters, something else:

"What we don't realise is that you can have a life-changing encounter, travel to a place that causes a shift in your heart, can meet someone who changes you, you can go, do, read, see, watch, something, anything, that makes it just a little harder to breathe. And you think, yes! Here I go, from now on, life will be different. But the thing is, that experience isn't full-grown, it's just the seed. It's the beginning, not the road itself. That's the map that you use as a roadmark, not the trail you'll walk. And it's up to you to decide to continue or retreat into routine and wonder why things didn't change. Too often we go through something revolutionary, good or bad, and then slip back into the normalcy of our day to day lives instead of choosing to do the hard work and tend to that seed. Then we finally take a step back and start asking ourselves why our life doesn't line up with our vision. How could that moment —the experience that mattered so intensely—seem not to have changed anything at all? That's the thing. You can have as many seeds but until you plant them, until you continually water them, until you die to self, choose to go through the process of growing...it's going to be a seed. What matters is what you do with it." (Hannah Nicole)

 
Every day I'm left to come back to that. Because I believe in pain—it exists—but I believe in other things, stronger things, too. I believe in joy. I believe in happiness. I believe in the warmth of relationship and the sustenance of beauty and the undergirding of a genuine love.  And these seeds, these tiny splinters of wonder and delight and understanding and...care...they need nurturing. That steady trickle of hurting, on multiple levels, is  part of what waters those seeds. There's an easy sort of oblivion in being perpetually happy that doesn't allow for compassion, for entering into someone else's space of pain (and in entering bring the presence of something beyond pain). Paul had something there in his letter to the Corinthian church, when he spoke of being able to give comfort because of having received comfort. The greater the comfort given, the greater the ability to give...the implication being that the greater the comfort, the greater the wound. 

And yet—and yet—when I anticipate this summer I'm thinking less of weighing out pain and more of collecting seeds, more of picnics by the lake and the cool of the shade and hysterical laughter over crazy inside jokes and sweet tea in mason jars and splinters and suntans and spontaneous adventures into familiar strange places and stories read aloud with the children sprawled around on the cool basement floor and romping with the dog and hugs hugs hugs. My mad jaunts into the sunset are scheduled, and now I'm looking past those to the quotidian moments that I want to turn around and see at the end of this summer, no matter what shape the season takes (because one never really does truly know). And not only do I want to collect seeds, but I want to plant them. Because time is short and people are so much. Because this time, running away, I turned around and confronted myself and realized anew that I can't scatter the pain, but I can allow it to be used for something else, both for me and for the people that I love. And I choose life. Oh, I choose life. Let these seeds grow.