Walnut Room this way

Walnut Room this way
Rio.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

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.

3 comments:

Beth said...

Oh, how true, So often we fight the current instead of going with it, Sometimes I have to tell myself to just get out of the water, sit down and let it go by. Thank you for these words, they are encouraging.

Suzassippi said...

And thank you, for the affirmation. Yes, sometimes we must just get out of the water and wait for the roughness to pass if we can, or as I once heard it, "love a dragon from way far off."

Lana Pugh said...

The world is a crazy place now. I wish instead of all the finger pointing and knee jerk reactions and political manuvering we could all just step back, see what's important, and continue to live our lives.