Calmness of mind. Does that mean calmness of everything else, too? Does my body—my heart, my nerves, my sweat glands—does it all need to remain calm in order for me to possess that gem of virtues, equanimity? If so, I’ll never be adorned by its fineness, the sublime mist which showers grace upon the just and unjust alike. Equanimity is a gift to everyone standing near. Not that I don’t aspire to possess equanimity. I do. I practice all the appropriate disciplines. I sit in quiet spaces; close my eyes; breathe. I listen carefully to the minutest of sounds—the radiator tink-tinking, the cat as it jumps down off the bed—and do my best to watch my train of thought be just that: a train headed into the hills out of sight. I earnestly try to pay attention wherever I find myself, whether it’s in the kitchen with my daughter or out by the curb checking for mail. Everywhere, smells, sounds, and sights abound. If I am present in the right frame of mind, everywhere is wherever I am. These are fine moments, shining with the ordinary presence of eternity. But what about during calamitous times when anxiety spills steadily from the collective unconscious like water from a dislocated faucet? What happens to time when it is flooded with fear and denial and anger and anguish and no part of the day is without its own share of damp? That’s when my heart gets involved, sputtering like a gas burner trying to ignite after the pasta has boiled over. That’s when my nerves are so overstimulated even a long spell of silence can’t quell the thrum. As for sweating, I’ll only hint: the laundry is piling up. This time of extraordinary worry—however painful, however horrible—cannot obliterate the ordinary which rests settled at the bottom of its raging riverbed. Plain pebbles, everyday moments, remain for the sensing even as we seem swept away in a torrent of difficult feelings. This is my current strategy: When I am ready, I step straight into the day prepared to get pummeled. I drag my feet, keep my senses open to what is clustered underfoot. There, ordinary moments await, dim but alight with eternity. There is no bling. Nothing to hold onto. However, in the absence of calm, I can be content with that. Karen Jessee Please join the conversation. . . and invite your friends to visit www.searchandknow.org.
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She sat me down in her kitchen, searched for blank paper under the school release forms for a field trip now canceled, and handed me a pencil. My friend—not quite a survivalist, what you might call a preparedist—accurately predicted the mounting number of people in self-isolation, those contained and quarantined which we are now seeing during the COVID-19 crisis. Two weeks ago, she had said with peculiar confidence, “Write this down. These are the supplies you will need. Shop for them soon. The stores will run out, and even if they don’t, eventually you won’t want to go out to get them.” Living in North Carolina, hurricanes are the disasters I usually plan for, or ice storms with power outages that last a week. These upsets belong to a class of irritation called “inconvenience.” They garner a long sigh and a prayer for anyone who might actually be suffering from the situation. In truth, my townspeople and I get a little giddy anticipating the unexpected, preparing for a few days without a freezer, like going camping. However this time, going to the store with my list, I felt something only scenes from movies and history books have ever conveyed: plague. I know my life isn’t a movie. It’s a Tuesday and a packed lunch and feeding the cats and going to work. More recently, it’s been last minute shopping off that list, gallows humor shared with friends who also use humor as a defense against dread, and lots of questions: Is the concert cancelled? Should we go if it’s not? What about our son’s school? Maybe it’s time to think about staying home. All this anxiety and excitement amongst my friends with college age kids has turned from motivational water-treading into dramatic, declarative action. We are retrieving our young adult children from colleges closed until further notice. My own daughter begins packing today for a trip home which may last months as she completes her next term online. She and I have both been focused and energized making the decision to get her out of her badly managed college town, one becoming an ideal environment for contagion because of negligent public policies and governance. Now that I am sure she’s coming home, I find myself becoming slowly aware of a feeling as unexpected to me as the public crisis itself: sadness. My daughter’s dearest school friend is a young woman—fresh, sweet, kind. . . .almost naïve—who comes from South Korea. It’s been difficult for H_____ to understand that even if it made sense for her to go home, doing so could risk her losing the chance to finish her education. The college hasn’t guaranteed re-enrollment for students returning from Level 2 and 3 countries. H____ just hasn’t been able to process this. Last week, our family offered to host her, bring her here to our home while she sorts things out. It must have seemed like a preparedist gesture to her—surreal, premature. Not until the college announced the cancellation of all on-campus classes for the coming term did H_____ begin to understand: she’d been dropped on the curb of her junior year with only the money in her pocket and no place to live. We may be privileged to have her come stay with us after all. During last week, as my daughter plead ineffectively with H_____ to come here to North Carolina, I heard her heart breaking with fear for her friend. “Doesn’t she understand? The seriousness? The truth of this?” When H_____’s denial began to ease, my daughter’s voice eased also, relaxing with the relief of having orchestrated a successful rescue. But what of the international students at school who are stuck in the one remaining open dorm, living all too close together in a town, city, country, oblivious to their crisis? What about the financially poor students on scholarships who literally have been kicked out on the street by their institutions with no financial assistance for travel or food? Suddenly, we have a new class of homeless in our society—young, motivated, intelligent people who lack resources to be independent, who need. These fresh, positive, hopeful young people who promise Time that all is not lost--they are lost. Right now. This week. My house is not big enough to house everyone who is being displaced by COVID-19. Perhaps my heart is. Perhaps my heart of sadness is large enough and open to all the young people and their worried parents. Perhaps your heart can fill with the teachers changing all their plans and the beleaguered administrators who have to make impossible choices. Perhaps our neighbors can hold the health officials, the doctors, nurses and pharmacists, journalists, baristas, and grocery store clerks. Perhaps, together, our hearts can provide a cradle of safety for those who most need it while we consider what else we can do. And we will need to do something. There will be lots of mess to manage and sort through. When I’m in doubt, I’ll go back to my list: Find interior quiet, equanimity, an abundance of compassion—as much as you can get. You can never have too much of these. Hoard up. They never go out of date. Karen Jessee Please offer your own thoughts by leaving a comment below. Invite your friends to Search and Know!
If you would like to receive an email notice of new posts, please email me at searchandknow@mindspring.com. Dear God, Sometimes, the impulse to fall face-flat on my bedroom rug overwhelms me. Desire in my belly and thighs brazenly hums its opinion, wants to draw me down until I lie close to you with a body I’m ordinarily too shy to share. It doesn’t escape me how much my embrace might resemble what so many faithful people choose to do on portable prayer rugs facing Mecca, the woman who washes her feet in Anderson Park’s public sink before praying on the sidewalk-- or the families sitting cross-legged on gem-toned carpets inside the Orthodox church at the center of town, sweet-talking you while gilded icons chaperone. These people know how to kneel. They go further, fold onto their rugs until their foreheads touch down in a reverence both body-bold and soft with grace. If I were to start falling for you, I would praise you at home putting my cheek on the floor where I know who I am. But you are everywhere. I might as well lie down anywhere, make a fool of myself in the grocery store, the library, the pharmacy-- anywhere that people go: your holy ground. How is it I can walk above what matters most without a bow, a touch, a blessing? Honestly, If I let myself go, I’d end up prostrate on pavement, lawns, all over town. People would notice. They’d point and gossip and give me a name: The Woman Who Falls in Love with God. But that hasn’t happened yet. When I go to my room this evening, I pray that even the low risk embrace I can give on my rug might transform me into one of your faithful ones. Not just I, but my body wants to know how to love you where you can be found and what to do about the ground. Karen Jessee *********
If you would like to receive notice of new posts, please email me at searchandknow@mindspring.com with Subscribe in the subject line. Judge not, that ye be not judged. —Matthew 7:1 Here it is, another New Year’s Eve, and I can report I am as judgmental as ever. I could make a resolution to “become” less so or simply “judge less.” But that would be fruitless—a gesture as if only to mitigate the harsh judgement of an angry God. He knows the truth about me anyway. Christmastime brings people together in increasingly close quarters until the blessed day is past and we can all go back to our desks, or rooms, or into the great outdoors—where an even more blessed solitude can be found. This year, I’ve been especially aware of how judgmental I am. A friend had challenged me to notice my intrinsic bias against certain kinds of bodies, especially ones abundant with fat. Judging my own self for pillowing had become a compulsion once again, and I wanted to be free of it. December’s many parties offered the context for discovering how effortlessly, how unconsciously I assess the attractiveness of people. This loathsome and obnoxious tendency is one I share with an entire culture, a culture which often values a person largely upon how they appear—how they look, what their work implies about them, who their friends are. That this prejudice is shared, this sense of entitlement to judge others, makes it no less horrifying to possess. My friend’s commission to be sensitive to my own bias made it clear to me I have been health-trolling my college-age cousin. In recent years, she had gained upwards of thirty pounds, and on her small frame the difference in her appearance was dramatic. I would thoughtfully complain to my college-age daughter (didn’t I know better?) that my cousin’s health is compromised. Her beauty is too, I would slur. But as far as I know, her health is just fine. Her fiancé clearly thinks she looks fine. The truth is, my cousin has always seemed genuinely pleased with herself. Her extra weight hasn’t changed that. A family party the week before Christmas gave me the pivot I needed. I didn’t want to think badly of this girl. Hell! I didn’t want to think badly of myself! The only alternative? Don’t make evaluating her appearance part of relating to her. I couldn’t judge her less; I couldn’t judge her, period. When we spoke at the party, I was delighted to discover she had hugs for me--lots of them. Her smile shone as brightly as a candle reflected in tinsel. I felt waves of affection for her. By the end of the evening, I could tell it was love. I am confident my cousin sensed the change in my years-old attitude of judgement and misguided concern for her. Her behavior suggested it, all warmth and resilience. People who are judged feel threatened and defensive not appreciative and open. They know they’re being judged and act accordingly. Which is the real truth behind Jesus’ dictum: when we judge others, we are known that way. People judge us for being judgmental. They are blameless, because they are right. If I don’t want to live in the swamp of Holier-than-Thou, I have only one choice. Resolutions to be better won’t bring me to the new territory. I must be different, not judge at all. I must be willing to grow into loving. I must be love. This is a good time of year to rout out a shortcoming like obsession with appearances. One of Christmas’s most salvific messages is the way God turns the world upside-down with the birth of his poor child. Jesus is vulnerable not just as an infant but as an immigrant, as a member of an occupied people, a rural people. Nothing good is supposed to come from “someone like him.” We know, however, that good lives in him, IS him. Christmas reminds me God isn’t judging. Whether shepherds or kings with their retinues—we are all welcome at the stable. Karen Jessee If you would like to be informed when posts are made on Search and Know, please write to me with "subscribe" in the subject line. Thank you!
Wouldn’t it be a huge relief, a way out of a perennial problem, if we—the healthy, the functional, the ones who seem un-sick, the un-needy—had times during the week when people knew ahead of time we want them to come visit? Their presence would be balm and buoy for us. We would be edified by their very selves and by their perspectives on a world we are cut off from. We would certainly feel appreciated because of their visits. We might even feel loved.
Then, during overlapping visits from a variety of friends, we could watch the intertwining of our lives, different pods of community intersecting in un-orchestrated ways. Even better would be not having to ask for help. The magnetic “Visiting Hours” broadcast would round up all the people who genuinely care. And I know they are there; I will always benefit from seeing them. The sincere and engaged friends and associates—they care even if they don’t visit, it’s true. Often enough, I fail to drop by friends’ homes just for love, especially on my own initiative. I say I am respecting their privacy. But I know how difficult it is to ask for needed reassurance or a healthy distraction from worries and woes. It requires willingness to reach out and admit, friend by friend, “I need time with you.” This is difficult to say. The temptation to not want to impose on folks by asking them to come over is as compelling as the feeling I don’t want to impose on others by coming around unannounced. An exhausting, fruitless hypervigilance can arise on either side. I don’t like admitting need. It exacerbates a vulnerability I already feel from being needy. Calling friends with a plea to come visit risks discovering I might be even more vulnerable than I know. One horrible blessing of being physically injured or ill is that people can tell we need them, even if we hate to admit it with all the vehemence of psychic protest we can muster. Need is not ours to manage when it’s visible. But what about invisible suffering? What about losses and grievances and existential doubts and grief? These are troubles which can lay me up for days plastered to the couch, heavy as sand in a blanket. It’s obvious to me I don’t feel well. Under these circumstances, reaching out to the people who would visit if they only knew seems impossible. Needing to express my needs simply adds more sand to my blanket, pressing me ever more firmly into the couch. So, what if I had visiting hours? Let’s make them 9:00-11:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays, and alternate weekend afternoons. What a relief! Karen Jessee |
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