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It was scheduled as "boy's weekend out." Five friends hurtling down the Colorado River, a white-water raft our ticket to peril and pleasure. We had been plotting this day, determining ways to make it a sport, a contest, talking big about our fearlessness and our desire for serious rapids. We were, after all, real men, all belly and bravado, and nature's playground beckoned.
The sun reigned high over an expansive Colorado mountain sky, endless and open, bleached of any rich or subtle hues. The sun baked our faces while continual sprays of river water baptized us with exhilaration. We whooped and cavorted and egged each other on. We looked forward to that evening in the Jacuzzi, beer in hand, telling and retelling the day, a forum for exaggeration and pure blarney about our exploits.
While the rafting crew worked to pull the raft from the water after our run was completed, I climbed the embankment and sat on a rock near the top, drinking in the warmth of afternoon. The area near me was littered with woody mountain shrubs. Something else caught my eye. Over the embankment to my left, growing from a ledge, stood a single clump of iris, sixteen inches high, a desert gemstone in a rich azure luster. I scrambled down near the ledge--literally on my belly, my face near the flower--and gaped, frozen as if in the company of a magical snow leopard. I confess to you that I touched its delicate falls like the face of a lover.
And then I didn't exactly know who to tell or what exactly I would say: "Hey guys. Come up here and check out this flower!"
That would have gone over big.
I do know that my hand shook as if I were overcome with awe. A Barbara Kingsolver line came to mind: "A great many people will live out their days without ever seeing such sights, or if they do, never gasping."
I felt lucky. And I knew. This is why I had come to Colorado. A single iris arresting something rudimentary in me. All my previous priorities paled. For neither my resume nor my clerical collar mattered one whit to that flower.
For most of my life, my spiritual had depended upon answers. Sitting on an embankment above the Colorado River, I had none. Only the glow of a flower, the warmth of the sun, and the invigoration of the river's energy and strength. I had only mystery and awe. And peace. For once there was no compulsion to explain, or clarify, or analyze. Which meant that I was lost in the moment--what some Catholics have called the Sacrament of the Present Moment--seeing each "present moment" as diffused with the sacred. It reminded me of Susanna Wesley's immortal prayer, "Help me, Lord, to remember that religion is not to be confined to the church, or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation but that everywhere I am in Thy presence."
So I sat for a spell in that presence, and at home.
Here's the quandary: How do you tell someone that you were unraveled by an iris? It's not exactly fodder for small talk.
Like it or not, the card deck of life's priorities is reshuffled in moments like that. Your resume takes a back seat, and you scramble up the embankment with a new posture, and a new frame of reference, knowing that your load is a little lighter even though you hold something new and sacred in your heart.
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still... Redeem The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream. Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
TS Elliot
Note to reader: Summer is rushing past (it seems we always use the verb "to rush" for summer, but never for winter). In my garden, our blueberries are ripe, the blackberries are on their way, and Black-eyed Susan blossoms cheer the garden beds. And while the Colorado River trip happened some years ago with friends (I tell the story in Soul Gardening). . .with so much of today's news being fueled by fear, and a sense that my own passion and heart is being leached from me. . .I needed a reminder of that iris.
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