Grace is in the details too (right alongside the devil)

Yesterday I sat at my kitchen table weeping as I scrolled through the Portland Audubon Society’s Instagram feed. There was no tragedy unfolding. I was watching videos of rescued and rehabilitated birds being released. It probably says something about how I’m feeling these days that that was all it took to undo me.

Everything is moving both too fast and not at all. I have no sense of my own edges and also feel like I’m living inside an invisible box. There’s also a seemingly endless supply of new things to be concerned about. Just last weekend, I heard a man on the radio say that the reason so many of us having breathing problems is that our mouths have evolved to be too small for our faces.

I instinctively touched my jaw and thought shit- do I have to start worrying about that too?

What a refreshing reprieve it was to watch and rewatch the bird release videos, taking in every detail. The awkward dips in flight as the barn owl pushes off from the flap of its cardboard carrier and slowly finds its stride, its wings backlit with sunlight. The tentative joy on the face of a volunteer, as she removes the lid on the carrier, anticipating and then relishing in the departure of all seven swallows held within it. The way that watching birds take off forces us to lift our faces skyward, an action that seems to open us up to wonder.

I was transfixed by the birds. Admiring and envying the way they instinctively knew what to do when presented with an opening. Not all of them were steady. In fact, flight was quite a clumsy effort for some. I loved the awkwardness. It reminded me of what a joy it is to witness someone stumble towards embodying their full form. A mature tree whose branches appear to be actively reaching out and upward or a loved one who relaxes into their stride during a performance.

Watching the birds I yearned for the experience they were having, one of expansion, movement, transformation. The place I’m in (and I think we are also in collectively) is uncomfortable and there are entire weeks where I desperately want to get out of it. I didn’t know how much I wanted that until I watched those birds gather themselves and take flight.

I keep complaining to friends that I feel leaky. If I could draw myself as a character in a Miyazaki movie, I would be an amorphous creature with an expressionless face that appeared to have sprung a leak. My attention would float continuously, never resting anywhere for long. I might occasionally notice and pat at my leak a little bit, my eyes widening slightly with disbelief before their focus slipped elsewhere.

Listening to me bemoan this leaking sensation, one friend reminded me of Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart. So I pulled my copy off the shelf and thumbed through it, reading the underlined bits and dogeared pages. One of my favorite parts is in the chapter on Hopelessness and Death which opens with this thought: “If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation.”

Chodron goes on to explain that, “We’re all addicted to hope–hope that the doubt and mystery will go away…As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.” Reading this made me wonder how much energy I’ve been expending in my reaching–grabbing really–for things that might make life feel different, livened up or toned down.

I could see how my squirming only made the current situation more uncomfortable. It’s like that little woven toy that you stick your fingers into and the harder you pull, the tighter the weave grips. The best way to extract your fingers is to relax and move slowly.

This morning, my husband and I took the dog to the beach because I wanted to be near something big and expansive. On the drive there, on the walk out on the pier, the walk back, and the drive home, I had the good fortune to end up behind people who were going slow. I don’t mean like a little bit slow, I mean the kind of slow where it feels generous to call what these people were doing movement. I joked with my husband that maybe the universe woke me up at 4:30 am this morning so that I would have ample time to slow down.

Maybe all of this slowness, the opportunity it creates for greater intentionality, is the work of gathering myself back together so I’m ready to push off when, at last, there’s an opening.