Plants and Birds and Mothers: 12 May 2013

This Sunday was my last trip out to Grand Rapids Friends Meeting until late August. I took a bike again, and it was the craziest trip - such an array of weather patterns. Sunshine, blasts of freezing cold wind, warm gentle breezes, hail, more sunshine, enough heat to make me sweat. Craziness. The world is beautiful, though, and it was a fun trip out. Having now learned the optimal path, both in terms of distance and scenery, well enough not to have to check my phone, it was certainly the most pleasant bike trip I've made out yet. It was certainly a bittersweet morning for me.

The meditation I've had over the last few weeks has been deeply involved with that idea: that the life around us and the life in us and the life between us all stems from the same Source, and so we can learn more about any of these branches by studying the rest of the tree. Walking past all the flowers and the little leaves emerging, a couple weeks after the sun had started to shine, I felt a very simple community with the little buds. I'm in such a spring season of my life, and I fear sometimes that when the Summer comes, I might look back on this time and criticize the blossom for failing to photosynthesize as prolifically as the leaf. There's always an apprehension in the back of my mind that I'll be more like the daffodils, which shrivel after brightening the world with a couple weeks of colorful display, than like the apple blossoms, which are equally lovely, but which are signs of the coming fruit. Especially when the point of college is to cultivate a certain anticipated fruit, it's nerve wrecking not to know why so many petals are dropping from the tree.

I arrived to an empty meeting house and texted Walt Marston that I wasn't sure if I'd missed a memo, since I'd never been the first to arrive. But I figured I would wait until Meeting was scheduled to start and take a moment to calm my spirit, regardless. The blossoms on all the trees - though they still seem a bit out of place to me by the middle of May, since I'm used to March and April being blossom season back home - just make everything look softer and more painterly. Every leaf is more noticeable after the winter season, when we become accustomed to the barren, fairly ugly branches - at least in Michigan, everything's just grey in the wintertime. But now that everything has suddenly exploded out of its cocoon, there is a subtle vivacity to the air and the dirt and the color and the sounds that makes something deep within me feel very warm.

Hearing something behind me, I turned around to see Mike Holladay approaching the steps where I was sitting, asking whether no one had arrived yet. We started chatting and went inside, and I explained that I'd come a little early because it was my last week. He gave a warm hug, and his laughter and lightheartedness was the same warmth in the breeze. And as more people began to filter in toward the start of the meeting, I got to shake hands and meet a couple that has just returned from their winter in Florida. I love shaking people's hands - it's so telling. The man's - I'm terrible with names, even when I've met people several times, forgive me - was firm, but not decisive. He shook maybe four or five times, where I normally only shake twice, but it communicated an appreciation of the moment, and the interest in his eyes when he asked for my name was inspiring. His wife, who was around the corner at the time, proceeded to ask for my name in precisely the same way - and my last name in precisely the same way - and shook my hand, but with about twenty times less movement, as light as a feather, with softness to match it. They both welcomed me, though they've been absent since my first visit to the meeting in October, and though it'll be my last for months. One does not simply extend that kind of greeting unless they've made the space their home.

I was glad to see Walt, who chuckled and said something about people having shown up in the end. Ron Irvine came in, too, and though I've followed him on Facebook, he's been in California for a month, and I've missed speaking with him. There was soon a small circle of people sharing mundane little jokes about the weather and the changing of seasons, the end of my Academic year, a book that's just been put out for sale by a lady named Anita who attends the meeting, things like that. The old wood and brick of the building and the warm lights and the warm faces and hands and smiles and hugs going around are so simple, but they're so rich and full and meaningful.

My heart was full when I sat down. Being around people like these - not just for their kindness, but openness of spirit and the clarity with which they see other people - humbles me incredibly. Again, it occurred to me that the "great cloud of witnesses" is not limited to Abrahamic forefathers, nor to religious figures, nor to just these people in Meeting, but also to the animals and the carpet and the phone in my pocket and the air and the Spirit and children. There is a weight to Life that contains a wise constancy I'd like to spend my time learning from, and I have a disposition that allows me to do so easily if I simply listen.

I have friends with whom I have been in conversation lately about the personal ethics of mind-altering drugs like pot. I'm intrigued by the debate, and it's very clear to me that pot is less harmful than tobacco. People have told me about all the great effects it has on your ability to meditate, and notice detail, and all that. And as I have let go of my old conclusions, I have come to the realization that regardless of whether I'm okay with whatever, I'm really not a fan on the conceptual level. A phrase kept popping up in my mind through most of meeting:

My soul sees deeper than any altered state. My spirit knows more peace than any breath of smoke. My imagination is realer than any high. To suddenly feel the room become alive with a Presence - or, rather, to suddenly notice that it already is - makes me feel as though . . . something can be done here. As if the soil is simply too rich for something not to grow, and that I am part of this garden. That we are all growing together.

Along with the fullness, the humility makes me feel very small. And because this is a disorienting and worthless feeling, I think, when it is not grounded in reality or linked to practical application, I began to imagine myself putting this newfound humility I have learned the past few months into my interactions with people, into the work I do. Not gonna lie, I'm very nervous to go back home. I recently shared a picture from the pretty big facebook page "I fucking love science" about a couple functional prosthetic legs given to a cat after a run in with a car, I received a comment from my mother that the picture was "cool, but I hope that's not the kind of language you're using."

My life has grown beyond this kind of issue since I have left home. I don't swear excessively, or in inappropriate contexts, but I certainly don't have barbed wire protecting me from some kind of canon dictionary of profanity. It is this way with many things in my life, the way it has become, where regardless of the answers produced, the questions I am asking now are fundamentally different from the ones I was asking twelve months ago. It is not, "What is really true?," but instead, "What is really meaningful?," and not "Where is God in this?," but "Where is this in God?." I, like many young people in my position, I'm sure, am afraid to return to a community that expects me to be someone I am no longer. I do not feel changed; I feel matured. I feel as though I have matured in precisely the way my community has taught me to do it - always seeking God, always making conclusions or coming to decisions with great discernment and integrity. As I have said many times, this has not been a process of rebellion for me, at all. It has been like letting a bird out of a cage, allowing it to perch on top of it instead of on the little swing inside. This morning, the fullness of my humility brought me the understanding that returning home will mean having to respect people that have taught me to learn things with which they will not agree.

I deeply want to maintain the peaceful love of life I have learned this year, both in meeting and out of it.  It has been months since I have really argued with anyone, and I would not like this to change. My nonacademic goals and desires have become very simple: to love, and be loved - or, alternatively, to appreciate and be appreciated - and to spread the peace that is a product of such actions. Reflecting on Mother's Day today was an anticipation of returning to someone that I have learned to appreciate much more objectively this year, which has been an extremely humanizing and worthwhile experience for me. I no longer see my mother as simply my mother, but as a person that acted in certain ways and did certain things and made decisions for and around me, growing up, someone that also has a personality of her own.

My hope is that we will be able to develop a closer friendship this Summer, but my apprehension is that both with her and with my father, there will simply be too great a divide between the daughter they expect and the person I am (though I honestly believe that they would like the person I am now better) for them to be able to approach me as a full being. Speaking as their kid, it's the bittersweet reality that home might not feel like this life and freedom, at first. But speaking as a newborn adult, it's knowing that for the first time in my life, it is first and foremost my responsibility to take this liveliness back home, not something for me to expect of them.

I have been given a million incredible opportunities, nourishment from everyone around me, and I have had life poured into me as if through a funnel. My prayer is that I will be capable of wrapping that up and bringing it home to my parents, so that I can give back to them what they have given to me; that I will be strong enough not to shrink back into my seed cap when the caretakers of my childhood garden continue trying to coax out of the earth things that have long since sprouted.

Today I recognize the shortness of season, and the youth of the world, and the youth of my mother, and the youth of myself. I recognize the simplicity of goodness, the goodness of simplicity, the depth of simple goodness. I recognize the flux between generations, the apprehensions inherent in this whole process, the great desire I have for my parents to understand (despite whatever doubt) that their work has been well done. But more than that, I recognize that this is not the first time my life has been doused in miracle grow, and that the way my life has worked, people - my dear mother in chief - have been constantly trying to help me find what I realize I have found to the best of their ability. I have a world to thank my mother for, because this is a world she helped me create. She tilled the soil, she planted the seeds, she trimmed the branches (and she tried to trim some branches that never came off). Maybe, this summer, I can bring back some of this fruit to the family dinner table.