Thursday, December 9, 2010

Sabbatical Reflections

Goddess is eating what remains of my socks on the beloved back deck and it is too cold for me to go out there and get them. She is a thief especially of socks and other dog’s toys. I’m running out of socks. Goddess is winning that war. I think that I have enough to get through this cursed winter. After that I won’t need them until the next winter. In the meantime she is out there munching away, occasionally looking at me through the glass windows smiling.

She is such a Bitch.

Standing in the shower this morning I noticed the quietness of the house. In days gone by I’d sneak around in the dark to not wake her up. I strove for quiet and somehow never really achieved it banging doors or dropping the brush.

Now the morning quiet is everywhere.

Water that is hotter than I normally have it is raining down on my head. Steam fills the bathroom. My skin warms. I wonder about my heart.

Goddess knocks open the door to the bathroom by butting her head against it and pokes her head in the shower. I swear the dog knows my thoughts and decided that I shouldn’t be showering alone. She laps the raining water and then licks it off my knee. Her head is quickly wet and she makes me laugh.

One of the things about being on Sabbatical is that it’s normally quiet. I think of the Trappist monks with their vows of silence that I rained upon one day. They live for quiet so they can hear God when she speaks. I’m not much of a monk but I’ve mastered quiet.

Nature means more to me that it ever did before. I’ve always been an “outside” guy but my thoughts were always in the city, with those who were relying on me to help save them from their worlds, or contemplating how to pay for it all. Focusing on these things enabled me to live in this house for ten years before Fran came back from the dead and showed me the thousand shades of green. Thank you Fran! You were the beginning of me coming back.

I’ve learned that you measure the changing seasons here by watching the marsh and not the trees. The trees are green, then suddenly they are not and then they are naked. The marsh has four distinct seasons. Dead brown in the winter is replaced by light green in the spring, then lush deep greens in the summer and golden in the fall. Anyone who says that the southeast United States doesn’t have the changing of the colors never study the marsh. I’ve lived here 24 years and it has only now that I learned this.

“Waiting may be the hardest part,” if Tom Petty is right but it certainly works. After relentlessly chasing, convincing, arguing and pleading over a thirty year career, I’ve grown to just wait for things to come to me. I hardly go anywhere anymore when I just to go everywhere.

And sure enough people and opportunities have come to me. I’ve bumped into a friend on the beach which led to work and had old partners visit which led to new partnerships. Friends and love have forced their way through my front door even when I had it double locked because I wanted to be left alone.

I can wait now. The best things are worth waiting for anyway.

Everything doesn’t have to be done right now. Damn that has been a hard one for me. I’m a multi-tasker who would win Olympic events if it were a medal competition. Though I still lapse into it and can do it when I want or need to, I’ve learned that things take care of themselves in time. I only influence a part of whatever it is that needs to be done anyway and then it is up to others. And others do not do things according to my timelines or demands.

The past is dead and gone. Though I’ve never been one to tip toe through it much I have learned to celebrate the things that brought me joy and happiness, fear and frustration, and to try to learn how they brought me to this moment in time; because nothing else really matters except this moment in time.

This has all made me calmer. I’ve always been one hyper person. Bill Berry (not the former Drummer for R.E.M. but the one that I went to Seminary with) once told me that I just couldn’t stop. I would jump up in the middle of a confessional conversation to take care of something that I suddenly thought was more important. I no longer do that.

I watch Goddess eat my socks with Fran’s thousand shades of green dancing behind her. The quietness of the house is magnified and the sun beams down new opportunities that I ponder. I am excited with anticipation of what will be. And like those Trappist monks, I wait for unspoken words to become flesh.