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A choir of Living Things
I read somewhere a fir tree kept a neighboring stump alive for 100 years. It funneled water and nutrients through its root system to the ragged remnant, of what I can only assume was its dear friend. We cannot know the mystery completely, but when we look around us, we can find endless examples of the benevolent nature of life—the kindness of a tree, giving all, to uphold another life for over a century. We are being breathed alive by something kind, held in form by some loving unknown. Nursed and cared for by our neighbors and friends, and strangers, known or unknown to us. Seen or not, I have come to know this is irrefutable. I can say this with certainty because no matter how forlorn an island I have felt lost on, bread and water are always brought to me. No matter how hard the knock, no matter how petrified the kernel, without any clear cause, love has always found me and tilted my lighted eyes upward.
I must have been five years old, looking out the attack window. We lived next door to a halfway house. A rotating door of brokenhearted people, coming and going before my young eyes. One particularly bitter day, I watched a man, 6 feet tall, fall bare hands into the frigid snow, so far away from himself, he could not organize his body upright any longer. Pushed against flakes of ice, I watched him rolling in the confusion of his intemperance. To try and lift himself, he would put his exposed hands into the snow, only to tumble backward again. I watched him try and try until I could tell his hands couldn't bear it anymore. He pulled his coat arms down like mitts. He was laughing, but I couldn't understand the humor. My tiny heart was quietly breaking as I watched, shattering into small fractures. Each one reached out to him. Unperceived by him, light from a dark attack window to the right of him, was bearing witness to his pain and shimmering warmth onto him.
The window of memory keeps certain things frozen inside the psyche. A point our awareness gets fixed on. A moment grabbed and felt one too many layers deep. The ones we can't shake or mend completely. There in the innocence of a child, the first deep recognition of human suffering so old, it reaches into the heart and makes a home there forever held inside the one who sees and experiences it. He was one of my first teachers. He taught me: We are a hurting people.
The story unfolds, and pins are placed where our work lives. We are to see the pain and learn the medicine to offer. We are forced to witness the suffering that cannot go unnoticed—starting when we are very young. Seen through the eyes, felt in the belly. If we were to look back at all the trauma in us- the biting wind that came and never left- we may find a part of us busy looking to heal this without our knowing. We are sending our stores to the weakening stump of ourselves, our friends, and our neighbor—the antidote stored inside your being. Our purpose is born for most of us in this way.
