Ears, Lines, Simple and Ease

              Chicago’s bipolar weather has left me cuddling up on mom’s Indiana couch escaping the city to watch the snow dance out of the sky and land on real soil, not concrete (it still amazes me how long I can go between walking on land/soil/grass in the city.  Sometimes I realize it’s been months and then I’m called away to rediscover earth, the beach, anything that can connect me to nature, even if it’s just the Garfield Park Conservatory).  I am bundled in layers with a crochet blanket gifted to me from my step-grandmother years ago when I was freshly released from high school.  Here I am, idling in quiet, my tea steaming long sighs and invitations at tongue-burning sips, and a pile of books wait.  Mmm, I have out a deep breath.  Mmm, this is right and this is good.

              This is where I am.  All roads have brought me here to this moment of contemplation.  It’s comforting, knowing that I am where I ought to be and exactly nowhere else.  It’s really a blessing that we can’t be two places at once.

               Yesterday at Creative Cafe, my project at Little Brothers, I toiled in the kitchen assisting with making lunch and setting up for our large group.  It was pleasurable toil, as most manual labors are, breaking the routine and giving an outlet for instant gratification–the completion of a tangible project.

                As the Elders came in, and I started offering drink, reliving my days of a waitress now with less stress and genuine and attention, Megan escorted a non-descript man in.  Okay, he wasn’t non-descript completely, he had huge ears.  Wonderfully large, the kind of ears that should have been hidden by shaggy hair (too bad he didn’t have any!).  They were an artist dream, an element of cubism grafted from the canvas and onto his wrinkled head.

               I served the meal with wonderful helpers, and cleaned up while the Elders started to make their way to the fourth floor.  As the room cleared the gentleman with the ears lingered.  Soon we were alone in the empty bistro.  I awkwardly tried to encourage and engage him upward, but he was immovable until Megan cam and tethered her arms around him murmuring words of consolation.  I didn’t give him much thought even then.

                 Upstairs in our movie theater/craft room (yeah, be jealous, we have a movie theater here, don’t you want to be a volunteer at Little Brothers now?) people were already diving into their projects.  They were decorating memory boxes.  Ears now sat in front of his box unmoving.  I waded my way through the throngs of walkers to see who was doing what.  But ultimately, I was drawn back to Ears away from the familiar faces of my regular Creative Cafe friends.  Under the insistence of Megan he had glued a couple of white buttons onto the army-green lid.  “I can’t see,” he said as he leaned hi nose mere centimeters from his pained glue dot.   So, as I am ought to do, I encouraged him and together we navigated the murky waters of vision impairment and art.  “No straight lines,” he insisted more than once.  We thusly avoided a linear composition and went more for an explosion of randomness and glue.

                  A half hour later, I sat next to Megan who was also in need of a breather from the intensity of crafting older adults.  I was informed by her that he had been an artist in his prior life.  My interest in Ears piqued and I went back to his side to work with him, and finish the unruly lid.

                 As we cleaned up he pulled out his old yellowed sketch book.   He wanted to show it to the teacher, so I took that opportunity to budge in and check out his work.  My jaws slacked when he opened the pages.  I wanted to frame almost all of the sketches, to admire them longer and meditate on the artistry.  I praised him.  “Remember,” he noted of the simple line drawings of gazelles and bears from the zoo, “there are not straight lines in nature.”

              The truth of that hit me (okay, so I know this is arguable–but, er, I don’t like arguing, so give me a break).  Indeed, God doesn’t call us to live straight and narrow, but calls us to the mess of being in relationship, to love others as ourselves.  Love is mess, being in relationship eliminates the possibility of a straight line from birth to death.  I was confronted because I had been trying to put order to the chaos of life all week; so much so that I had forgotten to appreciate the gentle and abrupt curves of being present.  (And, not so spiritually, I immediately felt a lot better about my own physical curves that have become more…luscious in the last year).

             On the train ride to Indiana after work, I continued to think about no straight lines in nature when my second insight came from the book Julie & Julia (I’m a sucker for food relational conversation, hence the extra-lusciousness i.e. XL (thanks Hannah’s dad)).  She made a startling point of the obvious (which are what most points are made of: the obvious).  Just because something is simple, doesn’t make it easy (can I get an Amen?).  Let me say it again, because I need to hear it more than once:  Just because something is simple, doesn’t make it easy.  Just because I know that I need to be present doesn’t mean it’s easy to be here and stop worrying about my future.  The simplest things are often the hardest.*

               Yet, here I am today, no straight lines (not even the fine ones I’m noticing around my eyes and mouth from my years of smiling), just the simple work of sitting on the couch watching the snow fall.

                  And, my reward for being here, in this moment was the rascally scruff of a squirrel trying to find its way in though the glass patio-door.  It danced clawing the window, and I couldn’t help but smile.  I bet Ears would have whipped out his sketch book, and in a few arched lines captured what was waiting for me.

*Wonderful note, I wrote this yesterday and during today’s sermon was introduced to another bloger who speaks to this very idea of simple doesn’t mean easy.  If you’d like to read some REALY amazing writing (huh, give me 60 years and I’ll have this kind of wisdom, but still a lot more parenthesis) check out Jan Richardson’s blog: http://paintedprayerbook.com/ Into the Wilderness.  It’s breathtaking.