A Liminal Moment

"Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world."

-John Milton

Starting the day surrounded by jarring sounds. On one side the tree service in our alley, cutting and grinding with a steady mechanical roar in the background. On the other, Dio across the hall in the bathroom going through his morning expectorating ritual to try to clear the resin out of his poor tortured respiratory system. Peg's over in Elmira with Dean and Slane, obtaining some overdue shots for them.

Today's work lineup includes a mediation after lunch, and likely too much time on the phone between now and then. I need to find a few minutes for a run, given that I'm exploding out of my clothes these days and starting to look like every other sixty-something overweight American. It happens fast. I signed up for the Wineglass Half Marathon over the weekend, as a means of holding myself accountable on a program that will keep me huffing around the neighborhood for a few miles several times a week.

Of course, drinking a little less would help. Several hundred empty calories a day. I could get away with that in my youth, but these days I can feel myself growing every time I open an IPA. Plus, how long have I been doing this? Let's see. First beer bash was when I was maybe fifteen. I drank an entire six pack of Michelob and fell over backwards into a haystack. So 46 years. And the body really does keep the score, not just in girth but in so many subtle, unpleasant ways. Time to find some other means of stress management.

And the stress has been pretty overwhelming in these weeks of starting a new business. This morning I figured out that Quickbooks wasn't sending the Florida DOR some payment I owe for unemployment taxes or some such. I thought the point of the software was to take care of all that. So I began this morning by paying them $199 to set that up for me. What other accounting landmines are out there?

My goal after finals was to file a motion for summary judgment every day until I had about a dozen out there, potentially weeding out nearly a quarter of my files. The biggest stressor is, and has always been, working in this system of deadlines and sanctions that is the American legal system. It's what wakes me up every night at two a.m. so I can lie there and email myself reminders about tasks that no single person could ever complete without working 70 hours a week, and I just don't have it in me anymore.

But yesterday afternoon brought one of those transcendent moments when space and time collapse onto one another, and the trivialities that occupy us and make us miserable just fall away for a few minutes.

P and I drove up to the condo after a going away gathering for one of her Guthrie colleagues, a young man who's grown to be sort of a nephew of which we can be proud, a doctor with a nice wife and two great kids, the same age as our Jim (the doctor, not the toddlers). He set up out in his driveway tables and chairs and a collapsible tent that tried to blow away on the blustery afternoon. The guests were mostly young couples from the neighborhood with kids none older than maybe seven or eight, all scampering around us and tumbling in and out of the bouncy house in the front yard. It made P and me sort of nostalgic for the life we didn't have together.

An hour later we were at the Cliff, and sat on the patio in the complete silence I've only experienced there, interrupted only by the rustle of the occasional bird who arrived to sample our bird feeder and toss seeds onto the ledge where they'd be easier to gobble down. Low clouds crawled along from the south. A light rain started to patter the leaves below us. "Susurrus", Peg whispered, one of those words of the day her email brings her each morning. "The sound of rain on leaves".

And there, just for a moment, we found ourselves living in a space that was always there, without deadlines or Trump or financial worries or the looming reality of our senescence just ahead. I don't remember ever feeling so calm. This was every bit as real as all our daily unpleasantness, more so really. All this stillness, all this life, and we bustle past every day too busy to hear the message. It's all okay. To quote one of my faith tradition's favorite mystics, Julian of Norwich, "All is well, and all is well, and all things shall be well."

Indeed.