My Bowl is Full

One year ago today, I posted my first blog entry entitled  “Amber Opportunities” about collecting amber rocks and interesting opportunities.

 

What a difference one year makes.

Initially, I started my blog “for the kids.” I live with a hazy, nebulous sense that my days are numbered, or equally nebulous, that something “bad” is going to happen imminently. Yes, I should probably see a therapist about that, but until that happens, I figured that I should start writing things down for my kids to know in the event that I'm not around to tell them. You know, not like how to do laundry or how to cook a meal, but all those sermons they might need to hear at some point from their mother. Or perhaps more accurately, sermons that their mother might feel obliged to impart to them.

 

So I started writing down things that I believe, or aim to believe.

And the kids did read the first few posts – partly because I told them to – but it didn't take long and my blog was no longer “for the kids.”

It became “for me.” It became my way of paying attention to my own life, of looking intentionally for lessons I could learn from things that were going on around me, of processing my own struggles, and then in a way that is difficult to describe, this paying attention and looking and processing became a way of praying for me.

I have never stuck to a creative outlet as long and consistently as I have to this blog and it has been life-changing. I considered starting a blog for several years before I actually got up the gumption to because I didn't think I had anything to write about; nothing was really happening in my life. But when each week I expected myself to have something to post, I opened my eyes to my own life and realized there are always things happening. Small things that are really big things. Big things that are really small things. Tiny things that hold nuggets of wisdom waiting to be mined. 

 

And now my bowl is full. Just as I have continued picking up my amber stones along the same stretch of road for a whole year and adding them to my collection, so I have continued to pick up moments of insight in my life for a whole year and written them down. Some stones are big, some are deeply hued, some are a little too rough for the collection, some are too small to be significant. But they all went in my bowl and now it is full. As my life is full. And I am thankful. For the big things, the rough things, the small things, the beautifully smooth and coloured things. I am grateful. 

 

“[The Lord] anoints my head will oil,

my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Psalm 23:5b-6

It is deeply gratifying and humbling for me to realize that there are people in this world who take a few minutes of their lives, some even regularly, to read what I have written. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Evening Light

I am grateful for these...

Piano

We retired our old piano this week.

This was a rather melancholy moment for me.

The piano was old – manufactured around 1905, according to the man who did some work on it a couple of years ago – and I love old things.

And this particular old piano held a lot of memories for me. It belonged to my parents before it belonged to me.

When I was very young, after all the kids were in bed, my mom would sit down at the piano and play. I loved falling asleep to the sound of her music.

My mom gave me my first piano lessons on it when I was 8 years old.

I taught my first piano lessons to my younger brother on that piano. That was his one and only year of piano lessons, but I have taken credit for all his subsequent musical prowess on account of that one year.

I practiced many years worth of piano on that piano. I remember thinking one time in high school that it was during some of these practices that I was following Jesus' imperative to “not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing .” (Mt 6:3)

These last two memories may have happened in the same year.

I taught my own children their first piano lessons on this piano, some more willingly than others.

But the piano was old and had suffered many difficulties in its' latter years. A period of cold and disuse. A period (in between my parent's ownership and ours) of misuse where it lost a number of its ivories. A couple years of high humidity, a couple years of brittle dryness. These are hard on a piano, particularly this old piano. Its sound board had two major cracks and it wouldn't hold its tune any more, making any piano practicing painful to listen to – even when all the right notes were played.

So we hauled it out to make room for a different one. One that has all its ivories and an uncracked sound board.

But first we had to get it out of our neighbors' basement.

They said it hadn't be hard to get it down.

Only this time we were going in a different direction. Up is a little more challenging. And these seemed like particularly steep stairs. Stairs are always particularly steep when a piano is involved.

We enlisted the help of the musical brother (in payment for all those amazing lessons 20 years ago!) and the help of the neighbour whose wife had sold us the piano. And of course, my husband who knows how to do things.  Like hauling a piano out of a basement.

I, on the other hand, only know how to worry about how to do things. How were we going to get this thing out of the basement and up the stairs without someone ending up squashed beneath a piano? Were these ropes going to hold? Was the piano going to tip and put a hole in our neighbours' wall? Was anyone going to end up with a hernia or excruciating back pain? Oh dear, oh dear!

Long story short, the piano is currently in my living room, ready to be played. No one died or was injured. We left the house in good repair.

My husband was exhausted. He said his back was fine; it just took a lot of energy to be the “Yes, we can” guy. Probably especially when your wife is flitting about worrying and expecting anyone to die at any moment.

You'd think that I would know a thing or two about how helpful worry is by now. My brother, in relating another piano-moving story, likened the worrying owner to an irritating fly that you can't swat away because your hands are full. What would I have done if the piano had ended up on top of someone? Said “I told you so?” “I knew this would happen?” Something equally helpful?  Is hand-wringing and "voicing my concerns" really the best way to show that I care?

I don't generally think of myself as a worrier – so long as everything goes according to my plan. The obvious solution to my worrying, then, is that everybody and everything just cooperate and participate in my good plan. It's only when I come up against some resistance to this solution, or when I don't have a plan for the situation in front of me, that I begin to worry. Which is as helpful to the situation as an irritating fly.

In Luke12:25, Jesus asks his disciples: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? [or, I might add, to the life of anyone else, including a piano mover?] Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?”   

I am guaranteed obstacles in life, things or people or events I can't control. A quote I read this morning may have some insight for this predicament. Theologian Richard Rohr says, “Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them.”

"Be Youself; Everyone Else is Already Taken"

I've had many students over the years and I've learned a lot from them.

I've been thinking a lot recently about one particular pair of students, two boys. One smallish, one biggish, but the same age.

The smaller one, well, he was a piece of work, that boy. You had to watch that he didn't take over the class both with his unselfconscious antics and with his innate leadership qualities. He was a piece of work, but he was an original.

The bigger boy was smart as a whip, but was a follower. So what would happen is that the first boy would get going telling some story or creating some activity he wasn't supposed to. This would begin to register in my mind and I would start to reprimand him. But by that time, he was on to the next thing, and the other boy would be parroting the first boy's actions or words verbatim, and the second boy would catch the reprimand. I found this frustrating because it wasn't really fair to the bigger boy to get in trouble for the smaller boy's ideas. I also found it frustrating that the bigger boy, who was so sharp, wouldn't just be himself, come up with his own stories, his own interesting actions. He spent his energy being a “knock-off” when he had it in him to be an original in his own right.

I found it frustrating, but the reason I've been thinking of these two recently, is because I've been wondering if I don't have more in common with the bigger boy than I'd like to admit. How much parroting don't I do? I see or hear someone I respect and try to behave or talk in a similar way; I see how “proper” people maintain their homes or careers or families then spend energy mostly feeling wrong for not doing things “properly.”

Am I an original or a knock-off? By this stage of the game, would I even know the difference in myself?

In the art and fashion worlds, original pieces are always more valuable than knock-offs. I would say the same for people I know: the ones who are truly themselves, who are comfortable in their own skins, who aren't trying to be someone else are more interesting, more comfortable and safe to be around, more encouraging. For some people, I suppose, this comes naturally. For others, it takes a tremendous act of courage to remember and embrace their “original” status.

So God created mankind in God's own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female God created them....

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Gen. 1:27, 31