This week brought some major spiritual counsel from a wonderful gifted advisor who I sought out and asked for and was fortunate to meet for a long morning session.
The advice was perceptive, experienced, thorough, and deeply caring and concerned. The conclusion was that I’ve really burned out my life in a scorched-earth effort to be close to other people. Now I need to 1. Quit using up the remaining years of life the same way; 2. Realize that loneliness and sadness are nothing but a self/flesh habit that I’ve clung to as a comfortable choice; 3. Renounce the delusion that happiness depends on close personal relationships and belonging to a home circle of my own; 4. Commit to Christ as the Bridegroom of my soul as my only necessary companion. The conversation held two and a half hours of warmth and kind humor and encouragement that the time to change is right now before it’s too late. There was fortifying homework, with prayers and spiritual exercises and a reading list to take home and emphasis on checking back soon on my progress. I expressed heartfelt thanks for the time and care, walked back to the bus, went to the office, and spent the rest of the day all dissociated and blank.
This dedicated advisor didn’t know that the very same advice has been the particular personal verdict all my life from early childhood onward. (That starts early for Catholics, where plainer girls are advised to start planning for the convent.) It’s been handed down at me from spiritual traditions East, West, and everywhere else. People utterly devoted to and wrapped up in their own families insist that I don’t need one. What no one knows, and what words can’t even convey, is all the labor I’ve invested in the prayers and books and exercises begging God to either grant me a home family in some shape or form, or else give me some peace about being so desperate and alone. But it’s still like talking to a blank wall. (Christ excels at Christ’s own energy and essence, and if He intended to call me away from earthly bonds to a mystical marriage wrapped up all in Him, He would be awfully good at bridegrooming and would have made that clear as lightning by now.) God went to a lot of trouble putting us here and giving us bodies and a lifespan. Aren’t we supposed to spend it loving and caring for each other really really well? This society is full of humans who have no one, and humans convinced that they really don’t need or want to be close to anybody. Every walk down the street and every glance at the news headlines shows just well that is working.
So all right, after the session I got on the bus in tears and greeted the driver and we had a nice hello and goodbye, and at the office answered a bunch of service request emails, then discovered that we have a whole new security guard and amazed him by going over to shake hands and learn how to pronounce his name and hear all about his home country in East Africa, then walked over to Trader Joe and bought some groceries and thanked my favorite cashiers, and then dropped off a package of TJ frozen mango chunks to the new security guard as a snack for his dinner, and then went home and suited up and took care of Catcub and held her brush while she brushed herself and curled up in my lap for a rest, and then watered my little Oxalis shamrock plant that was starting to wilt, and watched it perk right back up in minutes, and checked on Angelina who has Covid, and helped the Wings dig up a whole heap of potatoes from our patch, and then showed the pile of taters to two very little neighbor girls who ran over to look and were astonished that potatoes come out of the ground! and you pull them out of dirt and eat them! and one little girl asked her Dad to photograph her with the bowl full of potatoes, and the other little girl was kind of scared to get near the potatoes because they were of course covered with dirt, and her super shy Cocker Spaniel who has always freaked out when people look at him finally tiptoed over to sniff those amazing potatoes and give my topsoil-covered hands an appreciative sniff and lick, and then I took a picture of Morrow’s red lilies (see above), and then went to bed and tried to sleep but didn’t sleep really from feeling all discouraged and upset from the state of my soul.
___________
Then today it was time to go to an office event at a super secured high-end building in the very heart of downtown. It’s a neighborhood that was designed to be wonderfully beautiful but is now the epicenter of violence for our whole city especially since Covid lockdown. The trip was a daunting prospect, especially after several violent attacks right on the train this week right at mid day. So I made a big folder to carry with a color street map and step by step instructions, then memorized the instructions and bus stop numbers and schedules. To my surprise, our train station was full of patrolling guards, and our train car held three, 3, sheriffs dressed for the heat in heavy uniforms with very heavy padded jackets. One had a real classic German Shepherd, a breed we don’t see much in the city. The dog had a nervously wagging tail and was braced and rapt in hyper vigilance, actually staring down each person as they entered the car. His harness announced that he was part of an anti-terrorist bomb unit. It is anybody’s guess why we need this dog on our car, but I decided to stay pretty close to the team. At my stop I complimented the men on the alert work ethic of their dog. “He doesn’t miss a thing,” I noticed. The officers were all smiles at my greeting. The K-9 handler pulled out a handsome full-color laminated business card, and handed it to me. The dog’s business card! It showed his handsome portrait in harness, his name (Quasar), his special skills and training, and the name of his handler and the security unit. I was very pleased, and showed the card to Angelina and everybody else.
Outside the train station, walking all along Crime Alley and then waiting at a notorious bus stop, it was very sad to see how many useful and interesting businesses had boarded up and moved away, how other notorious bus stops had simply been removed along with their benches and garbage cans, and how most people on the street were struggling terribly with medical and other afflictions. One young man lay full length on the pavement with his face to the ground, laboring to remove the dirt from a sidewalk crack with his fingers. Others were curled up against buildings or pacing around talking to the sky. No one seemed attuned to or aware of anybody else. It was a revelation of urban planning at its most triumphant and troubled: human suffering, magnificent architecture, uplifting scenery, graceful tree cover and planter gardens, signs over empty stores showing that this was once a thriving neighborhood. Security guards were everywhere. I nodded to each one, and they nodded right back. There were uniformed cleanup crews poised and just waiting for someone to drop a straw wrapper. Finally I remembered that this weekend there are major festivities and celebrations which draw our greatest tourist crowd of the year. Lockdown and crime drove them away these past few years. But the city needs the revenue, and needs visitors to come back again, so the security presence was all part of serving those tourists.
The destination was a potluck with some leadership from the umbrella organization that administers our department. It was a great opportunity to single out each colleague, people I’ve met only over Zoom, and sit down for a chat about their lives. I got to ask and hear about their children, and their dreams for their children, and what their kids like to do and talk about and eat for dinner. There were lots of good and charming stories of the kiddos and their accomplishments at their age and their little antics and creative words and hobbies. We got to admire and eat one another’s potluck recipes, and to laugh when one of my dishes, a package of Trader Joe 72% chocolate chips, melted in minutes in its jar before I moved it to cooler shade. Every conversation was positive, friendly, and of general interest; everyone’s contribution was welcomed and included. One colleague told us about the Kodály method in Hungary of teaching schoolchildren to sing as part of the curriculum, and we heard about how Hungarians know all the words to all their songs, and they sing together even on city buses. We passed around Quasar’s business card. We gave an about-to-be mom a hug and made plans to throw her a baby shower next month. Then we helped the host tidy up. He actually agreed happily to accept my chocolate molten sculpture under glass as a souvenir of our day.
After work I ran to the store to pick up groceries for one of the neighbors, and another neighbor ran outside to give me his new issue of a Christian journal that he knew I’d like, and then in the garbage I found a brand new giant sized Tupperwater bin with lid and hosed it off, and the smokers near the garbage bin admired that, and another neighbor found a nice solid wood caned chair in the trash and we admired that too, and then I washed and filled the water bowl that we keep on the street for dogs, and then other neighbors met to plan how to water the Wings’ garden while they are away this week, and we exchanged phone numbers and made a watering schedule to take turns.
It was pretty dark by then, but we noticed little bats or big moths or something swooping right at our heads. They were hummingbirds, circling right around us! We watched the birds for a bit and then said good night. I picked up my Tupperware bin to wash down in the bathtub. It’s just the thing for the back closet, maybe for winter clothes or for extra beans and grain.
Then at day’s end instead of the usual evening prayers, it really cheered me up to come across this fine YouTube tribute to Kate Bush from Russia, by Marina Zaitseva and Jukebox Trio. If it doesn’t play when you click on it, searching for the url or the title might work.
consolationland 