To distill one’s own life into a few words is impossible. Perhaps, like obituaries, the distillation is best done by others who out of necessity must pick and choose what seems to them most salient. But so much is missed. It’s like looking at old trees, knowing they have withstood vicious winds and searing seasons of drought as well as serene rains and ubiquitous light. You can see what they have lived in their gnarled bark and twisted limbs, in their unique – often silent – stature. You could never reconstruct it. You could never reassemble all those years of days and nights, years of leafing and shedding and straining to the light above and depths below and come out with a living, breathing organism.
I’ve done lots of things, many adventurous, most mundane, some professional. When my body that carries within it the singular mix of experiences, thoughts, and knowledge that have shaped who I am is laid in the ground, what will be laid with me? Maybe that is a better question.
I am a daughter of parents who were literally rescued by Jesus. Their rescue has always been the surety of my belief, the anchor that has held when doubts and struggles, storms and rising tides toss the craft of my soul. I can doubt what I read, doubt what I hear, doubt what I observe in our careening world. I do not doubt what I learned as a young girl crying in the dark, “Dear God if you are out there if you will keep my parents from getting divorced if you will stop the arguing and yelling I will give you my life I will go wherever you want me to go.” I don’t know where that prayer came from – we did not attend church – but I have never been able to shake the knowledge that Someone heard. Someone answered.
I am a wife, an imperfect mother of three I love with all my heart, a reader, a lover of beauty. I deeply appreciate my friends. I crave color, the green of plants and blue of sky and ocean. I exult in sunlight and love to be on a boat, especially in the marshes and estuaries where I grew up. I cook a lot and invite people in: friends, students, near-strangers. I walk the woods with my environmental scientist of a husband, binoculars in hand, searching for birds. I listen repeatedly to the stories of my father and family, all people of the sea. Their stories of living and working along the North Carolina Outer Banks are heartbreaking, hilarious, deadly. Real beauty is like that.
I am a perennial gardener. I cannot stop digging in the dirt, wrestling plants and bulbs and roots into the ground. I’d as soon stop breathing. And always in the digging, hauling, dividing, mulching, watering, pruning, searching, waiting – hard, dirty work that exhausts my body as it soothes my soul – I am aware. Someone is here, every particle of space is filled. I do not doubt it.
I do not have credentials as a theologian, philosopher, botanist or most anything else. But with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes. . .” I want to discern the story and working of God and hear his ceaseless calls to me in all the colors of life – the bright, beautiful, dark, foreboding. I want to know His presence not only in the majestic but in the most common of places. And seeing, “Oh, He is here, too,” remove my shoes.
