It’s the Small Things…

This is not the blog post I drafted for today. That one can wait.

What arose out of my gritting-teeth frustration at hyper-trivialities early this morning now comes to fruition in a different form on this page:  what really matters.

I realized that I do not really have the words to capture “it.” The question is not: What would you do if you knew you had only a month left to live? Our culture has now made that cliché. And it is not about doing anyway. It is about being. It is about what we feel in our guts in any moment. It is about not being able to predict how we will react but allowing ourselves the freedom to just be however we need to be.

The question is probably not: How will you react or respond when you or someone you love is diagnosed with ____________ (whatever you most fear as your final crushing end)? We cannot know how we will react.

I sat in a tiny cold metallic hospital supply room with a family member a dozen years ago as we heard “c-a-n-c-e-r” unwind itself from the mouth of the doctor we didn’t know and indelibly tattoo itself to my beloved kin. The shape of our shock was further punctuated by the string of words: surgery.immediately.stageiv.resection… I couldn’t have predicted that a red hot nausea would rise unbidden, unwelcome, unexpected to my throat and that I would reel with dizziness and that I would put my left hand flat in the center of my loved one’s back in a way I never had before and never have since.

Someone I have adored since I was two years old is severely disabled and in chronic pain. So when he rushed himself to the emergency room a few days ago, I was on alert. High alert. This is not somebody who is melodramatic; he has seen and felt excruciating pain more than most. I told him, twice, later that day how courageous he is! I learned so many decades ago that I cannot fix or change this. But I responded in the tiny way I could, the only thing I could do: by listening to him without agenda or my incessant list of questions. I later allowed the small flow of sadness, the sadness for his pain and the pinch on my heart of his always-good-cheer, to rest on my evening. Gratitude and sorrow are not mutually exclusive.

I read a deeply moving essay by a survivor who detailed how chemo felt moving through her once.limber.then.cancer.ridden body. But the essay wasn’t just about cancer or chemo. It was about how life shifts and we step up to the changes, and how things we didn’t notice before suddenly gain a monumental perspective…like the expectation of how food will taste.

So we cannot answer a question like: What will you do if you get cancer, or your loved one dies, or what is on your bucket list, or how will you react when…, or what’s.the.most.important.thing.in.your.life, or what of today’s tasksandplans would you dismiss if this was your last twentyfour hours?

And these are not macabre questions or depressing ones. These are the queries that lead us closer to understanding in our bones what really makes us sing, dance, paint, walkalabyrinth, sniff a flower, or hold the hand of our loved ones on the bareopenlandscape. They are pointers toward passion. They let us live fully rather than in diminishment.

All we can do is step up in the moment and be true to the fire in our guts when we are in the core center of our passion. Pay attention to it. Nurture it. We can honor the speechlessness and the shuddering feeling accompanied by a flood of tears when we know we are just precisely who we need to be in that one instant.

There is an almost unspeakable, almost unattainable, almost-concealed-by-taking-it-for-granted beauty that lies swaddled in the warm red beating of our heart that we know, without reservation or fear or judgment or ambiguity or compromise…it is this that we come to know as That Which We Cannot Not Be. And we more than likely do not know it by the burning bush or the booming voice from above, but in all those small things that can change us on a daily basis, moving us closer to that centralcorepassion. We can foster it in all the little stuff so when the big, lifechanging monumental things occur, we are practiced at taking refuge deep in that belly of our calling.

It’s the small things:  like writing this quickly-drafted blog instead of the one I’d already crafted (which would’ve been easy enough to publish with one click of a button)…because it is this blog post that carries itself in my guts with clarity and honesty. It is this blog post that will go up unedited but at least with a hint or shadow or a barely visible shining edge of what really matters - like the photo of first light (predawn) hugging the edge of Planet Earth taken from space. Like the silhouette of the hummingbird I see on the porch pavement before actually catching sight of his iridescent redgreen form. Taking a big wide swath of a view in order to crystalclearly see the small thing that animates us keeps us vibrantly alive!

All blog images created &/or photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2014 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."