Making Space for Whatever Comes

The first bluebird of the year perched on one of the three bluebird houses I posted in my back yard. It was right at sunrise. There’s a feeder with mealworms nearby. I had worried that, since bluebirds prefer houses facing east, that mine facing west would be of no interest. After it had flitted away, I picked last night’s eggshells from the kitchen compost and scattered them and some cotton tendrils on the lawn nearby. I was trying to put in place the things that may attract the specific kind of beauty I wanted to see.

I know that is entirely out of my control.

However, doing so made me remember years ago when there did not seem to be the space to think in this way. I clearly remember one fraught very early morning. I was up preparing for a class to teach at Duke later that day, making coffee for my father-in-law before his radiation appointment at the clinic mid-morning, after ferrying three kids to three different schools. I was harried, short-tempered, with no patience when my father-in-law “Pop” called me over to see the sunrise.

“I don’t have time,” I said. No time to look at the sunrise with a dying man? I dried my hands and walked over. It was, indeed, stunning.

Aren’t those often the moments that stay with us? …when contradictory emotions sit side by side… anger and grief? Patience and impatience? Now six years later, having worked with many clients with older parents in similarly impossible situations, it is easier to have compassion for the younger me who was barely holding it together. There were plenty of moments of ineptitude and the opposite of wisdom.

I suppose now, out of that fire, but seasoned by others—personal, and professional--I’ve learned quite definitively that as much as one tries, some crises resolve in ways you hope, and some don’t—despite your best efforts.

I’ve also learned, on this morning when it seems the whole world is waking up to spring here in North Carolina, sometimes doing something as simple as sitting outside, among “the peace of wild things,” as farmer-poet Wendell Berry says, can help one shift from unwise mind into wise mind.

Maybe that was why my father-in-law called me over to see the sunrise that morning long ago?

I now see a chick-a-dee is checking out the bluebird box; a starling is trying to balance on the wildly swaying mealworm feeder. But out of the corner of my eye, I notice a bluebird, too, land beneath the birdhouse. It’s found the eggshells!

How brilliant its feathers.

Mary Oliver's poem, Praying, comes to mind:

It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate, this isn't a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.