A Sudden Calm

I’ve been feeling a bit more off balance than I’d like, and doing everything I can to get a grip. It comes and goes and I’m wishing I felt more solid.

Taking time to be with friends these last few days has been good, but I’m still feeling some anxiety.

After I wrote my blog yesterday, I was reading other things and it all started to get to me.

Then I read Matthew Dicks’ blog which is emailed to me every day. You may recognize the name—he’s the storyteller who created Homework for Life, a practice I continue.

Anyway, his blog was about meeting a friend in despair over the state of our world, and he talked to his friend, sharing the difficulties of the past—concentration camps in Germany, the draft during the Vietnam War, the economic issues of the 1970s — and he assured his friend that we all come out of these things by taking small steps. He ended the blog saying “In every small way, find a way,” and with this image:

I felt an immediate calm.

I’ve never seen this image before, but yesterday I never needed something as much as it. All I could do was stare at it. I didn’t even want to think about the meaning.

But today I did write about it in my journal:

I look at this truncated tree, and the instrument that did the damage. I feel it is my life that got cut down—my teaching life and my married life. And I’ve always known and felt there would be new directions for me, things I can’t imagine right now. So I see this so perfectly rendered and it moves me deeply. It removes anxiety. It’s factual.

This happened. 

And is still happening

In every small way, find a way.