The middle drawer of her mother's dresser was filled with silk stockings, dozens of pairs in many exquisite colors, each wrapped in the store's original package. They had never been worn. Rachel admired the stockings, imagining the texture and enjoying the array of colors.

One day she asked her mother, "Why don't you ever wear your silk stockings?"

"Because," her mother answered, "they are too good to wear. They may get torn or damaged. Besides, they are too valuable. It's wartime, and silk is now used for parachutes for our troops. Someday, for a special occasion, I will wear the stockings."

Rachel remembers a family vacation when they were away from their apartment in Manhattan for a month. They returned to a ransacked and burglarized home, their personal belongings askew, scattered and broken. In the main bedroom, the dresser drawers hung open. The middle drawer was completely empty. The silk stockings were gone.

Rachel tells how her father bought more locks for the door. He made certain every house after had at least three locks on the front door.

It is understandable.

It is our human instinct, once we've been harmed or hurt, to double-down on precaution. But this is not just a story about loss, or even about the need for more protection.

It is about whatever we keep wrapped inside of us... awaiting the right occasion.

 

It is as if there's some kind of governor on our emotional life and we either don't want to see, or haven't been given the permission to see what is inside--what is ours to engage or contribute or value or spend?

What is it, exactly, that we are waiting for?

What experience will rise to the occasion, which will allow us to say, "Now... let life begin?"

And when did we swallow the notion that life begins some place other than where we are right now?

 

"Eventually I began to use everything I owned," Rachel Remen writes about the lessons she learned. "Perhaps the only way we get to keep anything may be to use it up. Perhaps we are all given many more blessings than we receive."

 

Perhaps so. May we have eyes to see.

 

My good friend knows wine. Writes about it, appreciates it, savors it. He also knows wine people. People with grand and exceptional wine cellars. He told me the story of a couple with one such cellar, a collection to admire. Now mature in age, the couple knew that their years were numbered, and that many of their friends had died with full wine cellars, those rare bottles collected for a special occasion. ("You know," he told my friend, "when we say we'll drink it when the occasion is right. And, for some reason, the occasion is never quite right.") So. They made a decision. They would collect no more wine. They would enjoy, take delight in and share the wine that they have. In their words, they decided to "drink their cellar."  

 

Okay. Count me in. Just tell me how. Isn't that the magical question? HOW? Is there a way to do this? Is it something about our need to perform? If I'm going to embrace this present moment--especially in silk stockings--I might as well excel at it! 

 

We need to cut ourselves some slack here, assuming that there is a big prize in spiritual well-being for people who have Aced the test on embracing-the-sacred-present technique. I do know this: Embracing the present isn't a beauty pageant. And I have a hunch that people who really do love (enjoy, live, venture, give, risk, embrace) life are literally, non-self-conscious about method or practice or performance. 

 

In Rabbi Abraham Heschel's mind, it's even more basic. "I would say an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. What keeps me alive--spiritually, emotionally, intellectually--is my ability to be surprised. I say, I take nothing for granted. I am surprised every morning that I see the sun shine again."

 

For 25 years in Invercargill at the south end of New Zealand, Burt Munro worked on increasing the speed of his motorcycle, a 1920 Indian Scout. He dreamed of taking it to the Bonneville Salt Flats to see how fast it could go. By the early 1960s, heart disease threatened his life, so he mortgaged his house and takes a boat to Los Angeles, buys an old car, builds a makeshift trailer, gets the Indian through customs, and heads for Utah. Along the way, people he meets are charmed by his open, direct friendliness. The uncertainty is still real... if he makes it to Bonneville, will they let an old coot race on the flats, with makeshift tires, no brakes, and no chute?
And yes, they did.  In 1967 Burt set the land-speed world record.

Before his trip, his young neighbor Tom (maybe aged 12) asks him why he's going to all the trouble.

"You'll live more in 5 minutes on that bike than some people live in a lifetime. And if you don't follow through on your dream you might as well be a vegetable."

"What kind of vegetable?" Tom asks.

"A cabbage."

 

Well I don't want to be a cabbage, so let the spiritual adventure begin. Except if I'm honest I will tell you that a spiritual adventure isn't necessarily what I had in mind. I read GQ today and I was just hoping to dress for success.

 

Here's the deal: At some point in our life, we give up who we are--the reservoir inside of us, filled with hopes, dreams, generosity and yearnings--for who we think we should be.

Or because we think our life will be safer.

I don't know when that coaxing toward precaution started for you.

I do know that whatever was censored--however long ago--is still inside.

Live with regret if you wish, but it will only compound what is already lost.   

The alternative?  In the words of poet Mary Oliver, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"  

 

I spent the day scrubbing my blue-stone patios. I'm on the back patio now, recuperating, enjoying the fruit of my labor. Eva Cassidy fills the air with her other-worldly voice. A goldfinch is at the feeder, the first this year. Fiddleheads--from our native Sword fern--unfurl ballerinaesque toward the sky. I raise a toast to the branches of ivory-white blooms on the native Elderberry, appearing like candelabras against the hunter green forest, poetry for the eye, seemingly ordinary episodes in natures' repertoire evoking deep and unforgettable emotions.    

   

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