Moments of Grace, Intimations of Serving

Gavin Connor

I once worked with a filmmaker who was both humbled and horrified by his attempt to reveal on film something of the qualities of the northern lights. The experience of those qualities were the source of his quest and thus, ultimately, the “attitude” of his quest. Wonder and awe as an attitude. Loving gaze. The vision of the heart. They were there all the time, these lights

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Here again, with the descriptions below, is an attempt to explore a certain quality of our experience, from out of the quality itself. A quality that surrounds, pervades, suffuses, reveals, lifts, renews and sanctifies. Something quite beyond our control, yet which holds us and supports us. The obedience to this something is to at some level ask "What's present?" It is thus a listening to the deeper octaves of the soul. A resonance through the heart with the gently surging beauty of the world. What or whom are we most truly in relation with?

These are description of grace. In so far as Beauty is what Grace bestows they are descriptions of beauty as well. A striving, in the main, for a presence with Presence herself.

I have brought some soup to share with a friend who has been working in the garden. It is cool and blustery, the grounds deserted, the earth still damp from a recent rain and the sky threatening more. My head and body is tense from a couple of hours on the computer, and I am more or less conscious of the general undertow of anxiety that has become a companion in recent weeks. My friend joins me straight away on a bench just steps from her work. She seems happy for the impromptu break, the food and the company. Indeed between us, through the sharing of the meal, our mood becomes light and grateful. Our words, already few, gradually fade off altogether-, not for nothing to say, or from an emptiness, but rather, we seem to be finding ourselves- -to be entering--to find ourselves entering the rich folds of a deepening silence. Thick and substantive, soft and elemental--a sort of descending surround within which the earth rises and everything is held. Everything: we two, the bench, the garden the vivid unfallen greens, the windblown gestures of plant and cloud and sky, the momentum of the day, the crush of decisions, the tension of uncertainty, the encroaching chill, even the immanent return to work--all of it held, supported, given ... a boat on the sea… borne aloft by this gentle mighty embrace. The quality of time too expands, becomes more like space, holding both past and future in this mysterious equilibrium. It is a space, like the silence, neither inside or outside, but rather both, between, around -- -shared, our homage, touched, for a moment, with a joy that I can scarcely contain.

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It is a dark time in the parking lot of Raleys. A good time for walking. No rush. Dinner cancelled, sweetie away, too tired to work. A bad day lingers on in wretched tenacious fears and worries. I'm so tired of them, all manner of them--their siege, their dirge, their long slow ash-heavy attack. My God, is this all? The question is very much a sigh, sent from this stand of oddly beautiful cars. A sigh with which I unwrap my licorice stick ("mmmmm");unwrap too, quite suddenly, a beginning, or the whole of it.

What comes comes with a beauty that says "it doesn't matter," says "of course." The beauty is darkness. The darkness is thick. She is full, transparent. Not any place, She arrives now, from always. All ways. Holds these florescent fumey little thoughts within her warm deep licorice silence.

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Blue mountains, darkening sky, dinner is just up the hill. Feeling ridiculous, low as the tide. The more, these days, in that I move within a sensation of exile: a hollow in space and time, sounding echoes of sweet and relentless longing. Loneliness moves within this longing, and marks the circumference of my attention. I listen to the hollow as I walk from the sea; know it was there, moments ago, before the silver-arcs of the spitting clams, amid the raucous cows, before too, the wee rabbit, frozen but for its frightened heart. These gestures arise now with a blaze of rose in the sky overhead. The beauty forms a kind of painted rebuke: “Are you still, even here, where you are not ?”

Climbing this hill, something is giving way, something rising. All is not the same. There is an anxious pull in my belly, yet the road lifts; a heaviness too. The road, the ground, the earth, all of it, all around, is suffused with this lightening. It is as a greeting. A surprise. Everywhere too the light and color, fading yet vivid, a death made alive in this darkening surround. In this descending calm. The ocean as feeling. The dusk as Mother coming, immense, unfathomable, holding, like a hug, something more. A feeling…of several, a few…a flock to the back and behind. Not something to turn to, but a definite feeling. A feeling with such definite span. It is as being watched. A wing of the sky. Followed.

A calm remains, yet the calm is alive. Steps, mood, gaze, coming dinner, everything, the hollow too, is both mine and not mine, the same and not the same. The hollow is not filled, but held. And in so far as it is held, the longing (within the hollow) is more a prayer (within the holding); a prayer continually given and answered. Whose hold is this?
Gentle earth. Felt company. Good grace.

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We weed and talk, yet have come through the soul to Something Coming. Two movements.

Our conversation is about lies, but has opened as if from within. It opens, turns, and spreads like a cloud; a movement toward an intimation that is both held and veiled by our reaching, by the strain of finding sense. This strain is what is touched: and the touch beckons a larger more intimate migration.

Our mood is quiet and expectant as if something is coming; the mood is that of the whole garden. We rise from our labor, standing on the slop above the roses. Our work here with the beds is to hold this beginning – enter, follow, this careful pause. Inside this pause our smaller personal tones are gently displaced. Inside this pause adequate words do not lose their importance but begin to sink within the surging beauty of the phenomenal world. What the pause holds. Interiors of stalk and leaf, soil and sky, warmth, rising light, a revolving with an unfathomed apotheoses. We hold the pause yet the pause holds us. In the care of its following, the following of its care, we are turned inside out. It’s nothing personal. It’s no thing. The struggle of our minds opens in the heart toward the whole world waiting. Little fingers pull from its beat the universe shimmering. The world here. Us. Inside…out.

A calm, serene and vital, pours into this devotional bold, this heart, this vessel for the unfallen Mother’s song.

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A day of delays. The starter on the car fails, we are towed, tired, and arrive, tired, in the late evening to a frantic pace set by an energetic homebound, wheelchair riding great-grandmother in her nineties. The Untired. She has much to say, this willful woman, and says it less with discrimination than compulsion. A quick, brainy, witty, excited stream of charm and chatter, beneath which – one cannot miss – there moves a wary, restless longing, surely painful, surely unfathomed. A longing beneath the chatter, yet something else beneath the longing: a current, a calling, a presence, a holding. It is through attention to this holding that we warm to each other through the difficult evening, yet I am both surprised and honored to be invited into her private room, a potent inner sanctum of thoughtful, meticulously arranged memory. A lush miscellany of her life: photographs, pictures, books, drawing, icons and practical gadgets – a holding of another sort – permeated with deep feeling, from long, solitary contemplation and care. It is a room alive, and living with the dead. “Everything is a person,” she offers. Her tone in this room has deepened: still watchful, still interested, still softly desperate, yet hold too a silence, a stillness, an opening, but for what? Or for whom”

“Why am I here?” “What do I really know?” Questions like these come like burning flares from the busy fire of her commentary, yet drop like sparks into water. This deep oceanic plenty that has joined, surrounded and nurtured us, has now become inseparable from what she says and hears and how she hears or says it. The “sense of providence” in her life, her devotion to Mary, and the conversations with her dead, all of this seems to emerge now cloaked in silence, still, warm, from an intimate holding as vast and embryonic as night. She has, too, by this time, with moist eyes, placed me in the chair she sleeps in, her holy of holies, as if to say “see from where I see, listen with ears like mine.” The invitation is both to and from this dark ocean of grace; it invites, it stills, it whispers long into our night “let go into the holding….”

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We are together in the same garden, but are not looking at the same garden. This is her little lap of earth, her creation, and she is, this cool autumn morning, teaching me. She grows medicinal herbs for the people at the bottom of the hill. A community pharmacy in its last days. The whole place carries a disconsolate, dissipated, clearing-out kind of air. “Where is the future? Where does the love go?” Her garden too will close. Today she is showing me its weeds.

Another world, these weeds. Small and green and variegated, full of movement and migration. “What are they looking for? What do that have to say?” The cocks crow, though we cannot see them. A mighty tinkle of vials in the dumpster. Her tone is abiding and gentle. “We put in and put in…all this doing,” she says, “but the weeds, they come. To them we listen.” Little presences’ outside all intention. Little presences’ within her words and gestures and soulful eyes; and rather outside them, not quite in her control, part of some larger, deeper, more intimate surround she has opened upon, touched and summoned. A garden we suddenly share. Silence, depth, patience, gift. A whole unseen force of the earth opens like a petal and holds us there. Such vibrant stillness. Receptive. The realm of the weeds. Of the deep listening. Of a holding that is ever present, ever new, warm as the heart, heavens beyond our intelligence.

Gavin Connor currently gardens at the Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California. He is a former journalist, social worker, and Waldorf teacher. He is a graduate of the Sacred Service Program of the School of Spiritual Psychology.