Yesterday during prayer devotions, I walked through one of the
knee-high back pastures to the clearing in the woods where we had our
Maunday-Thursday vigil this spring. I settled myself down on a rock in a beam
of sunlight, under an umbrella of trees and found myself in tears, again. It
has been like this so often since the end of the bike trip. There often is
little to no explanation and no warning for my tears, they just come and go as
they will. They come when I take a walk by myself and see the full moon rising
up above the pine trees like a crimson sail pouring out over the waters of the
pond. They come when I see people expressing kindness to one another in
extravagant and unexpected ways. They come when we pray together. They come
when a room of excited people from around the world sing happy birthday to me
after an evening of games together as they did last night.
And they come in unexpected quiet moments like today. As I
write today, I am sitting in a warm childcare room with the windows open. I am
scribbling on a piece of scrap paper with a mostly-sharpened pencil using a
board book for a clipboard. The sounds of a sunny Georgia afternoon filter
through the screen door: birdsong, breeze, children in English class, the hum
of a ceiling fan, the gentle rhythmic breathing of two-and-a-half year old
Denise stretched out on the blanket beside me.
The tears and the laughter both come so easily these
days—and the need for lots of hugs too. Everything seems closer to the surface
for me, more immediate somehow. One of my good friends here, Leah, found the
word to name what it is I am feeling: genuine. A summer on the road has a way
of stripping away the layers of life and complexity that build up over the
heart with time. It has a way of taking away some of the cynicism that builds
up after hearing too much bad news. The work and joy of this summer were too
great for this not to happen. The questions and worries just seem to slip away
over time. Too much of this summer depended on having flexibility and being
almost completely dependent on others for the most basic of needs for me to
hold onto the bulwarks I have made to separate me from feeling too much or
being hurt or needing to let go.
The things I was afraid of before this summer hold less sway
in my life. I’m beginning to think there may even be room for God here again-
on the inside of me, not just when the occasion calls for it on the outside. I
do miss biking. I miss the simplicity of rising before dawn and riding into a
new day in hills and mountains I’ve never seen before. I miss the rhythm—as
exhausting as it was at the time, and how easy it was, in so many ways, to live
life with no home, to practice gratitude and flexibility, to let myself trust
and touch and be touched by those around me. I miss waking up in a room filled
up with other sleepy bikers. Even now there aren’t words for the fullness
inside me, the countless faces of those whom I will never be able to thank
enough for their kindness towards me, towards us, towards the people we rode
for this summer living in ramshackle homes the world around.
I didn’t set out to fix myself this summer. I just really,
really wanted to bike across the country at some point in my life and I decided
this summer was the time. And so I gave myself to the work and training and
planning, even when it felt so lonely and hypothetical and far away from my
work at Jubilee in the spring. I didn’t know anyone else going on the trip and
knew almost nothing about The Fuller Center for Housing. I didn’t set out to
“be fixed” this summer but, in the end, this trip, the people, the landscape,
the work healed me in places I barely even realized were still broken.
Sometimes, after an amazing trip, or several months abroad,
or a week in the backcountry, I have found myself grasping on so tightly to the
peace and wonder I discovered there. But it often seems that the tighter I
grasp, the more it slips through my fingers and out of my memory. Somehow,
though, this trip is different. The glow of the long ride has remained with me
and the stories are still bright and clear in my memory. Life here at Jubilee
is busy, but there are also patterns and unexpected spaces to reflect, like
this hour on a lazy Georgia afternoon—scribbling out thoughts on scrap paper
and a kid’s book filled with chirpy animals. My heart is full. My heart is
broken. My being is filled with hope.
Here is a little of what all that looks like in poem form:
Georgia in August is smooth
and silky-sweet with sweat and
the hum of cicadas and crickets
and tree frogs from every green
and bowing perch. To sit is to savor
the symphony of sounds and the
gentle, slow way time moves like
a banana spider on her web: first
one strand, and then a deliberate
other ending in a flourish and then
patience. Afternoons slow almost
to a crawl and I am sitting here now
on this floor, legs stretched out long
beside a napping 2-year old who
is breathing in and out like clockwork
and wiggling her fingers occasionally
in sleep like the air is so heavy she
can comb right on through it.
There is a word, I think, for when
serenity settles on the soul, for the
softness inside and the way it has
of moving from inside to outside
and back to the soul as easy as breathing:
relaxed, rhythmic, genuine.
Genuine. The way life moves when
there are no boundaries between
the world outside and the world inside.
Denise closes her mouth, opens it,
closes it again and sighs. Her eyes
flutter like wings and come to rest.
A Carolina wren calls out a tune
from across the bush:
My heart, broken.
My being, filled with hope.
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