Amidst the gardenia mist

It has been a tangled and twisted week, not just here, but everywhere.  Everything has seemed overwhelming to many of us, hopeless to many of us.  Anger and pain have been interwoven with hope and despair.  Public pain and private pain have wrapped themselves round us like an ill-fitting shroud.  Injuries pile up in our souls, layers on layers, absorbing not just our own injuries, but those done to our brothers and sisters all over the world, further twisting and twining the tangles.

 In the midst of the barren and beauty-less space, an unexpected work of nature opens the possibility of seeing something that is not there, of re-imagining something that is there, of allowing the emergence of what could be but is not yet, or simply taking the moment to acknowledge and appreciate that it is. 

I had gone over to Rowan Oak Sunday.  It was hot, and the humidity made breathing difficult.  In seconds, I was sweating in the late afternoon, the storm coming in to the west of me.  I needed photographs of the repairs on Rowan Oak for the Preservation in Mississippi post I needed to write for Tuesday, and I was running out of time.   I moved slowly through the roteness of the task, engulfed in the pain I had carried with me for days without sanctuary.

As I turned away from the last photograph of the house, I suddenly caught it--the sweet smell of gardenia floated toward me, lightly enveloping me in a moment of awareness that I am not alone.

I seek to be rooted.  Grounded.  When things happen that disrupt that rootedness, it sets me adrift, circling, churning.  And then I am reminded.

 When I find myself in a river of rapids, ride the current.  The river does not insert itself into the rocks or go through the rocks.  It flows around them.  The trick is not to fight the current, try to override the current.  One ends up in the rock.

The thing is to let the current take you around the rocks to less troubled waters where one can reach the shore.