All-here Grace

Science may explain mechanics, but how do the eyes of the soul see?

I seize the pen on the sill and I can record another one. With my hand still dribbling dishes, with the breath all caught, I etch it down in that journal always lying out flat.

362. Suds … all color in sun

I lay down the pen. Dry my hands on the dishtowel, dab at water spots transfusing into ink.

The house is a mess.

I wash up undone on an island of quiet. The loud and blur of the morning ache across my shoulders. The washing machine works, and the porcelain dove, the one with “peace” scrolled deep into wing, hangs by one clear thread. From the sink, I can see her spin, spin, this way, then that, around and around and dizzy around.

This is the way I have lived. From the time the alarm first rings and I stir on our pillows touching, stretch over his bare back and check those relentless hands keeping time on that clock. The time, always the time, I’m an amateur trying to beat time. The six kids rouse. We race.

The barn … and hurry. The breakfast … and hurry. The books, the binders … and hurry! In a world addicted to speed, I blur the moments into one unholy smear.

I have done it. I do it still. Hands of the clock whip hard. So I push hard and I bark hard and I fall hard and when their wide eyes brim sadness and their chins tremble weak, I am weary, and I am the thin clear skin, reflecting their fatigue, about to burst, my eyes glistening their same sheer pain.

The hurry makes us hurt.

And maybe it is the hurt that drives us on? For all our frenzied running seemingly toward something, could it be that we are in fact fleeing — desperate to escape pain that pursues?

I speak it to God: I don’t really want more time; I just want enough time, time to do my one life well.

The wonder right in the middle of the sink. Looking for it like this. I lay the palm under water and I raise my hand with the membrane of a life span of moments. In the light the sheerness of bubble shimmers. Bands of garnet, cobalt, flowing luminous.

I see through to the pattern. I see. The way my life, vapor, is shaping. I hadn’t noticed.

Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. When I’m looking for the glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slows.

The bubble in my hand quavers, a rainbow at fringes.

And blind eyes see: It’s this sleuthing for the glory that slows a life. In this space of time and sphere, I am attentive, aware, accepting the whole of the moment, weighing it down with me all here.

Full attention fills the empty ache.

Forgive me, Father, for not being all here. When Your very name is I am and You are in the present and here is where I can love You. Today, when I race ahead — return me to all here.