Being Is My Resolution
notes on time, innocence, tempering, and the ongoing primacy of love
Dear Reader,
When this newsletter began in February, I was living briefly in an Airbnb on Lake Corpus Christi with our camper parked out front while we tried to repair (and then replace) a broken truck. We spent six weeks in the coldest part of winter paddle boarding the warm lake and watching the sun rise over still waters. It was so idyllic I started creeping “for sale” houses when I’d go out running. A certain freshness scented the atmosphere for us. The world was young. Our family was young and cute and we were on an adventure, touring the country in a camper.
In retrospect, it feels like God consolidated a decade into ten months. My life has always felt compressed like this – a therapist I had in my early twenties once told Andrew and me that we are in a divine “training program.” We vibrated with resonance when she spoke it, and we haven’t left bootcamp since. Which is to say, a lot happens and swiftly and severely. We are always a little sore from a new variation of the workout.
As the year turned, our travel itinerary matched the seasons, unfurling like a cherry blossom through Sedona and Grand Canyon, building heat across Utah and Idaho, peaking midsummer on Puget Sound, then spiraling like a fallen leaf down the California coast, before flatlining eastbound on I-10 from Tucson to Ocean Springs.
We closed on our house October 16th. There’s this sense that the year slowly puttered out from there, parts of me crawling to the finish line. But I don’t think that’s the whole picture. It’s not as much that something fresh and cute lost lifeforce in an atrophic, linear process; rather, some deep maturation time-lapsed over the arc we made through space. That youthful and ambitious energy with which we started the year underwent an accelerated curing process; it hung out on the line we traced across the map, growing savory and ripe. We literally are not as young as when we began, but time-passed fails to compute the inner tempering.
In the last two months, sickness became my Teacher. It put me in bed repeatedly and canceled my plans and corrected the parts of me still convinced I’m operational on personal power alone. Man can only do by divine help, the Work says. And so it is for me. “Jesus Christ have mercy on me, make haste to help me in my time of need” became a ceaseless mantra.
Overall, and in coherence with the global ethos, I felt a momentous loss of innocence. The loss of my personal innocence in reckoning with the responsibility I must take in ever-increasing intervals to assure a life I’m proud to live. The loss of innocence in my children who this year turned five and seven; the oldest losing his teeth as an outward and visible sign of the lowering of an inner veil of self-consciousness. The loss of innocence collectively as we face ongoing crimes against humanity.
Everywhere I went this year, there I was. At some point we realize, across countries and galaxies, the quality of my Being is all I ever really have. The phantasmagoria of life turns over the landscape, and everything happens. Either I am taken or I am not. Either I succumb to the anxiety and despair of residing on the cusp of apocalypse, or I. Do. Not. Sometimes it isn’t one or the other as we all well know, and heaven is still here. Will we believe it?
Whether or not the new year is an illusion we co-sign to experience under the construct of time, it is a turning that feels real enough to most of us. A line in the sand allowing us to reflect and reorient. To begin again, on the off-chance we’ve set our gaze below heaven and absorbed a note of cynicism toward the prospect of existing. We can try again, every single day, but especially right now.
The quality of our Being is all we ever really have. Of what energy is it made? This year I have health goals and house goals and homeschool goals and financial goals. In fact, I am reclaiming my relationship to goals. Rather than relaxing my striving to radically accept myself as I am… I am radically admitting that divinity is a possibility for my Being.
The more I see of the world and its pain, the more I wish to be a well of love - a wormhole through which divine Presence and Courage and Hope pour into matter. This year, let us not be convinced that our salvation is anywhere else, but above all else, may we hold fast to the transformation of our Being, individual and collective, toward unconditional love for all beings.
May nothing less than love satisfy you. May nothing less than love sustain you. May nothing less than love wake you in the morning, or the middle of the night, and stir you to the recognition that, as Beatrice Bruteau said, “all of us together are the Messiah; we have to do it ourselves and it has to come from the inside out.”
“The more I see of the world and its pain, the more I wish to be a well of love - a wormhole through which divine Presence and Courage and Hope pour into matter.”
Amen!
So good to hear from you, Jane!
Recovering from 2 solid weeks of sickness which comprised my entire Christmas and New Years experience. But today finally I was well enough to sit in silence and prayer. Turns out there are so many lessons I learned and the main one is how startling simple The Way actually is. Putting love and service at the center of every breath we take. We can breathe!! We can love!!