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Kathleen Norris writes about her niece (in her book Acedia and Me) . When her niece was three, Kathleen's brother would drive her to day care in the morning, and her mother, who worked as a stock-broker and financial planner, would pick her up in the afternoon. She always brought an orange, peeled so that her daughter could eat it on the way home. One day the child was busying herself by playing "Mommy's office" on the front porch of her aunt's house, and Kathleen asked her what her mother did at work. Without hesitation, and with a conviction to relish, she looked up and said, "She makes oranges."
In a world where what you do (achievement, celebrity, notoriety), makes you "somebody," "making oranges" doesn't compute.
Well. Maybe we need a different way to measure.
I've been traveling for several days now. I returned home to piles on my desk. We all have piles on our desks. Or, maybe just in our minds. Either way, there's something that's tardy and requires our attention.
My trick is to move the piles around. You know, rearrange them. If it looks tidy, it makes me believe that I'm getting some work done.
And then people ask me, "Did you have a successful trip?"
"I'm certain I did," I tell them. Although truth be told, I don't always know. There is some kind of pegboard in our heads where we hang our worth or value. And it's too easy to get worked up about finding the right peg.
Maybe success is about "making oranges."
--Showing up.
--Being present.
--Connecting.
I once did a workshop where I asked the participants to describe life. One woman said, "Life is so. . .life is so. . .life is so. . .daily."
Yes. She's right. That is the secret.
Here's the deal: The miracle is that there need not be a miracle--just a slow drip of experience. Being mindful of small things. If there are truly no unsacred moments, then the sacred is infused into this moment. This conversation. This person. Even the smallest or most banal thing deserves our undivided attention.
Or, in the words of William Kittredge, "Moments when nothing happened. What sweet nothing."
In other words, we don't run from the moment.
We don't suffocate the moment with stuff.
We don't sanitize the moment with platitudes.
We sit. We listen. We look. We taste. We smell. We see.
We look for the light of God in the most ordinary, and even the most dull, of contexts.
(I know that I preordain, when I hope or try to orchestrate, rather than just experience. I also know that whether it is experience or relationship or liturgy or prayer or meditation, if you don't bring it with you, you're not going to find it there.)
It is winter now and the leaves are gone. But I remember back to autumn when the changes in my garden were striking, and I spent time walking the pathways savoring the tapestry. One day, the leaves on our trees were still shades of green. Six days later, the garden is in full metamorphosis. And I am in third grade, thinking about crayons.
In the third grade, I had a Crayola Box of 12. I did not consider our family poor. But I knew that there were two classmates in my grade from "rich families." One had the Crayola Box of 48. Another showed off her deluxe box of 64, with the built-in sharpener. We stood around her desk and marveled (our equivalent--in 1962--of a new iPhone). Do you remember the box of 64? Mercy. Did it get any better than that?
The picture in my mind is vivid, standing in K-Mart, on our family excursion to buy school supplies, late August, holding that box (knowing it was out of our family budget) and coveting. I never did own a box of 64--with the exotic shades of Mulberry, Goldenrod and Raw Sienna--and I made due with my 12, always making sure to color inside the lines. After all, I wanted to be somebody; and I knew the rules.
Thankfully, my garden has changed me. Now each autumn when I walk the pathways, I have my own box of 64. Our Vine maples look like a jellybean jar, leaves vary from milk chocolate to mustard to Marilyn-Monroe-lipstick. Nearby, the Katsura tree poses with an elegant posture, its leaves like miniature post-it notes and the color of peach-yellow. It stands out against the blood red leaves of Ninebark. And the licorice red leaves on the Sweetgum, and the scarlet Sumac. It's an outrageous palate that calls for giddiness. Thankfully, nature does not worry about coloring outside the lines.
This is not how it's supposed to be, I know. I keep an endless mental list of the things that need to be done. But when a grey day comes, when the horses stand over their hay as though there were all the time in the world to eat it, one of the things that needs to be done
is to sit still. Verlyn Klinkenborg
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