I woke to rainbows on my ceiling. After a luscious series of spring snows, the sun shone once more, streaming through the many~faceted prism that hangs from a beaded string in the high window of our bedroom. A beautiful way to start the morning, followed by a walk out of town, up to a place encircled by a ring of snow~covered mountains. I returned home sated with the wild beauty of this place.
I certainly love moments of ecstatic spirituality, experiences that pull me into something more. These days, though, it is the humble gifts of the commonplace that call me, an ever~available, albeit quieter, route to that something more. Chopping vegetables for soup. Hanging clothes on the line. Receiving the birdsong that streams through a window open to the cool morning air. Typing these words for you to read. Or waking to rainbows on my ceiling.
All such moments can be infused with significance. All already are significant, despite the tendency of our human minds to pass them by in favor of the novel. Life flows through all of them, an unending stream that animates us as it animates all things.
Being attuned to these ordinary gifts becomes more important when life is difficult. And no matter who we are, life will get difficult. We will be jettisoned from the familiar, the safe, the life~as~usual into a place we'd rather not be, a place we feel ill~equipped to manage.
The Bible is replete with such wilderness experiences, times when hapless souls not all that different from ourselves lose their bearings and wander, seemingly alone, as they try to figure out what the heck happened to the lives they once knew. And ecstasy? Well, there's not a whole lotta that going around when the pieces of a former self lie in tatters on the ground.
Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes of the need for a different kind of spirituality for times such as these, one “lean enough to live in the wilderness as long as necessary.” In an interview with Krista Tippett, she refers to this as a subsistence spirituality.
While something in me resists that phrase, given its connotation of lack and hanging on by one's fingernails, I realize those reservations reflect my discomfort with the whole notion. Like I said, I prefer spirituality of the euphoric variety, and I want it robust. As Taylor notes, though, such a spirituality will "lose weight pretty quickly" in the starkness of a desert terrain.
Wilderness has a way of paring down the fat, of stripping us of all we think we know, of the belief that we can live out our preferences. Such times, Taylor says, "have increased my reverence...(and) reminded me how small and temporary and woundable I and all my fellows are." Both the natural and metaphoric wilderness offer, in Taylor's words, "a feel of your true size," but the figurative kind asks us to, "find some way to open (our) arms to what's happening instead of insisting that it shouldn't be."
Subsistence spirituality also encourages us to anchor ourselves in the small moments of life. Chopping vegetables for soup. Hanging clothes on the line. Receiving the birdsong that streams through a window open to the cool morning air. Typing these words for you to read.
I drift back again to waking this morning to rainbows on my ceiling. I turn my head to meet my husband's gentle, smiling eyes. Medical issues have aged him so these past 8 months, that frailty worsened by the trauma of it all. He has lost much of his former identity, and has not yet moved fully into a new version of himself. And yet, his eyes hold mine as they always have.
Love flows toward me as it always has. And my love flows back. I open to the gift of him and see through the recent changes to the man he has always been and is still. I move into his arms, rainbows on the ceiling above us, rainbows shining between us, rainbows holding us steady in this newest version of our long life together.
Simple pleasures, indeed. I am so grateful.
With love,
Leia
