“My father died nine days ago,” I told my supervisor at work when the two of us were out for a connecting walk, a weekly ten minute meeting in the great outdoors away from the office cubicle. We spoke on both personal and work matters, where the only ears were the trees of the grove and the rustling leaves on the pavement.
The morning was frigid, bright with warming spilling-over, golden sunshine. Silence met us. She was quiet, eyes downcast.
She sighed, loudly, in empathy, I think. I can’t remember her actual response.
The line that comes to mind now is, “I’m surprised you’re here.”
*
That was over a year ago now. In the meantime, a pandemic scourged the globe and devoured what was “normal.” A professor of mine lost his son. A good friend lost both his dad and step-dad within the past three years. Pets have died, my cousin’s friend died at age seventeen, my brother collapsed into drug overdose and addiction (again) and went on a near-psychotic break (not as bad as last time, but still, bad), many small businesses had to shut down. Friends were protesting in the streets to assert that Black Lives Matter. Struggle and chaos continued happening, driving to a welcoming new year point in 2021 as the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters, Antifa, Q-Anon subscribers, and others desiring to cause turmoil in the media. According to Heilmer’s History, a YouTube channel highlighting a high school history teacher’s explanations of history and current events, this was the first time in U.S. History that the confederate flag breached the Capitol’s threshold.
Tragic. To say the least.
But, whether in line with my supervisor or simply a memory fragment, an overarching phrase comes to mind: I’m surprised you’re here.
That’s not a way of saying my supervisor expected me dead, or me saying that I now also expect to be dead. I am very much alive, and adamant about staying alive until it is my time.
But I still feel the surprise at how present I am in the current situation.
And enjoying it, for all the little things. These little things create an embodied existence:
Sourdough English muffins (homemade). Small business purchases: a tiny desk calendar, a porcelain tiger necklace for my mom (Happy Mother’s Day), some of Lore Pemberton’s beautiful art prints. A $10 solid mahogany wood book cart found at a secondhand warehouse. Lord of the Rings. Watercolor painting with rainwater. Animals—lizards on the fence, Buddy the cat leaping into definitely-not-his-owner’s truck and tipping things over. Bees in the trees when spring visits. Therapy. Narnia. Grace. Animal Crossing and Minecraft. Writing papers, poems, prose. An honest prayer while wrapped in a blanket like a caterpillar in chrysalis. Yoga in the mornings. Raspberry jam, with seeds and no added sugar, thank you. A two-hour conversation with a friend. Tears and more caterpillar blanket times. R.S. Thomas’s “The Bright Field.”
The body (and thereby the soul) can’t hide in the little things.
*
Yoga engages breath and muscles, tension and looseness. In its own language, yoga calls this yin and yang. Tension seeking balance. Grief is not a balanced emotion. It is tippy, teeter-tottering, more like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum behind a glass wall than an empty glass itself on a shelf. In the practice of yoga, I bring my grieving body into a semblance of balance, even for just a few breaths. The tension in my shoulders, neck, jaw eases. My body must recognize the weight it carries, and through the little thing of yoga, have that weight just soften.
Animal Crossing came to me during a season when my mind needed a place to leave my body while it was still. Prayer, especially Ignatian prayer is good for this, I learned later. But at that in-between time, Animal Crossing gave that space of bodily stillness and mind movement to me. I would catch stars, bugs, fish. I could harvest apples, oranges, cherries. My neighbors—a penguin, a bear, a frog, and an ibis—would check in on me and gently chastise me if I was too busy running around to say hello to them. For fifteen minutes, I allowed myself to forget the heartache, anxiety, and fatigue of being in-between, sitting in my body and soul. It was enough to be present with pixels on a screen and wish on another star.
A friend, about seven months before quarantine, had gifted me the poem “The Bright Field” by R.S. Thomas. There is a passage in it that has become a source of rest: “Life is not hurrying / on to a receding future, nor hankering after / an imagined past. It is the turning / aside like Moses to the miracle / of the lit bush, to a brightness / that seemed as transitory as your youth” (9-13). Part of Moses’s revelation to the burning bush is the physical act of turning aside. In order to truly give his full attention to the burning bush, to God, Moses had to stop what he was doing, mentally and physically, and stand there. He took off his sandals and professed in the action that the place was holy ground. In my grief, and my time at home, this burning bush and Thomas’s hidden admonishment of being present have taken different forms. Yoga and Animal Crossing are two of them. This poem is another, as is pausing to feel the wind on my cheeks, to thank God for rain and banana muffins, blanket-caterpillar-existence moments and the crack and creak of my bones as I rise from my desk.
*
These little things pull the body and the soul out of hiding. Yoga, Animal Crossing, and “The Bright Field” are three little anchors that pull me to the present.
Even in the midst of all the hard stuff—and it is hard stuff; it is really, really, hard stuff—there the little things are.
And so here I am. Still here.
