Connoisseur of life

This practice of learning to see has many flavors. I suppose it's not unlike developing my taste buds to the point of subtle distinction, like a connoisseur. A connoisseur of life.

Some tastes are more palatable than others. Tastes linger on the tongue, pleasant and soft, bold, bitter, sharp, mild, full-bodied, complimentary, fruity, tangy, tart, crisp, sweet, exotic, familiar, nostalgic, savory, earthy, peculiar, mysterious, rich, creamy, hearty, soothing, refreshing, warming, spicy, tantalizing, smoky, nutty, invigorating, clean. So many options for taste; and then, add in the layers of texture, aroma and context.

Such is the complexity of a moment experienced and savored as a gift of unique flavor. How often do I stop and savor even the mundane flavors, fill myself up with thanks for even these?

But today. Today I'm savoring a moment from yesterday. Not a serious, profound, contemplative moment, but an important moment nonetheless. A let-myself-shake-from-the-belly-and-fill-up-with-the-humor-of-simple-things kind of moment. I savor the flavor of this humor.

In the form of a staunch chihuahua named Fez.

The vet scolds, saying he should be around seven pounds instead of his nearly double that size. He's happy, king of the house, announcing his presence to us at the dinner table. At our feet, unseen, sending up pleas for a taste of Korean barbecue. He waits, until he can wait no more. Until his little white body covered in black splatters, a bandana of black fur around his neck, quivers with all that is in him. He's rescued, brought up to the lap, sitting a head above the table top.

Pink tongue, too long to roll up in his mouth, hangs out between his lips. My shoulders shake, laughter escapes. I try to listen, pay attention to conversation, but he captivates me, looking so pitiful, near bursting with emotion.

A high-pitched moaning yip escapes, like a hiccup. One, then another. His family encourage him, "Say 'I love you', Fez," in high-pitched voices.

Yip yip yip! Ry ruv ru! He's saying it, I'm sure! He's wound up, now releasing, till he gets it all out. Blessed relief.

He's rewarded with a small taste of barbecued beef. And I keep laughing, thanking, for even this moment. Especially this moment.

Seeing fresh

The evening air carries a chill on its shoulders. My boyfriend and I follow the flow of parishioners cascading down the front steps of the Blessed Sacrament, passing an older woman with her cane tracing the steps before her. She is alone. Before I can stop myself, I ask if she needs a ride home.

She stands in place, turns toward my voice, her face a billboard of surprise and pleasure. I'm glad I didn't stop myself from asking.

"Well! I live in Ballard, where do you live?"

"I live in Ballard, too. I'd be happy to take you."

"Oh, I'd appreciate that! God must have heard my prayer as I was walking down these steps. I said to him, 'It would sure be nice to have someone offer to give me a ride tonight.' My bus stop is a bit of a walk and on Sunday evenings, it can be a long wait."

Introductions all around follow, animated.

She asks, "Do you guys regularly attend Blessed Sacrament?"

"No, actually, this is our first visit." I place my arm next to her hand for her to rest on as we walk.

"Where do you usually attend?" she wants to know

"A Presbyterian church, actually." I wait, turn my head toward her face.

"Well isn't that great!" Her voice is larger than life, and now I'm the one surprised. "Many evangelicals can't use Catholic and Christian in the same sentence - it's a damn shame - and here you are - didn't you like the message tonight? He is so in love with Jesus! Not a lot of people get a chance to see that in the Catholic church."

I immediately like this woman. Uncensored, passionate, real. There's something fresh about her, after having lived a lifetime.

In the car, she fills the air with short stories of her life, and I sit enraptured. Blind since she was a girl of five, she's never slowed down. Studying at the University of Washington, she learned Spanish and French. She's worked as a social worker with the newly blind, helped people with developmental disabilities in El Salvador. Now she's retired, though the passivity of that word hardly describes her. She loves life and she loves God.

We pull up in front of her apartment building after backing up and turning the car around several times. My boyfriend gets out and opens her door, escorts her to the sidewalk. She is beaming, thanking us, feeling the ground again with her cane. We watch her, speechless.

Like a whirlwind, in and out, she is gone, leaving an impression hanging in the car.

Maybe God answered her spoken prayer for a ride home tonight, but he also answered my quiet prayer to see him fresh and alive in our visit to the Catholic church.

How like God, to use a blind woman to help me see.

Crossing the bridge

This daily practice of counting and recording graces - most often the simple, overlooked gifts so blindly rushed past - is changing me. Not an overnight make-over, but a gradual cleansing of the eyes that have been crusted with dirt and grime. As I child, I was prone to worry. Dentist appointments, shots, finances, the end of the world, being sent as a missionary to Africa - I worried about it all. I grew out of it as I grew up, learned to let go, but then came trauma.

Trauma scarred my eyes, distorted the lens through which I interpreted the world.

But each of us are bound to know the scar of trauma in our stories, whether in the past or today or somewhere in the future. So what is the vaccination against the hardening of disbelief, the suffocating fear and anxiety, the cynicism or pessimism that seap into our souls with the scarring?

In one word, thanks.

I'm learning that giving thanks daily, all throughout the day, builds trust. Saying it outloud and writing it down. Trying to think positive thoughts doesn't build trust. Medicating myself for anxiety would not build trust. Even praying about my anxiety or fear alone does not build trust. It's a certain type of prayer, the prayer with thanksgiving, that opens a new path for me to walk on.

I keep quoting one of my new favorite authors, Ann Voskamp, because her words cut a path through the muck to the heart: "Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with the planks of thanks." This is how I walk unafraid. This is how I walk into peace, away from anxiety. Deliberately, sometimes irrationally, turning my back on the scenes and emotions that fill up a moment with heaviness, and training my eyes to see grace through thanks.

I've glided over Jesus' words many times, but not today. Today I want to glide, but I stop and let the words catch up to me: "The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:22-23).

When my eyes are ungrateful, full of the shadows of death and loss and sorrow, I see darkness. I live in shadows. The only way to open the curtains that shut out the light, scraping off the crustiness, retraining the retinas, is the ongoing act of giving thanks.

But what about true losses, true grief, legitimate anxiety and fear and sorrow? Ignoring them is not the answer. I can't pretend they aren't real. I learn how to see through them. That bridge of trust is built with one plank of thanks at a time. While it's hard to see in the swirling of dust, in the raw ache of a wound, maybe the answer is to keep walking and not try to see everything in a moment.

"In time, years, dust settles. In memory, ages, God emerges. Then when we look back, we see God's back." Another Ann epiphany. How many bridges have I crossed in life, been able to look back and see God's back, if I have eyes to see?

Small beginnings

At the writer’s conference last weekend, I expected to be out of my league. Out of my comfort zone. Out of place. My sister encouraged, “Just go and be a sponge.” Somehow, it worked, imagining myself as a soft, sporous sponge soaking up whatever I could glean from the years of experience of writers around me. It felt less threatening that way, yet still required peeling back the curtain of shy self-consciousness that covers me when I’m around other writers. Being at a writer’s conference, if you’re going to get anything from it, demands a minimal level of vulnerability.

I stepped through the doors at the conference, crossing an invisible border between my worlds. Everyone seemed to speak a foreign language, know the lingo and the slang, navigate the streets with some sense of direction. Jump into the water, however, and see that they, too, are swimming upstream with everyone else. Maybe they can’t navigate the landscape without a map, but they at least know how to read the map. I hadn’t even picked a map up to study.

I’ve been writing from my early childhood, crafting simple, imaginative stories, and yet, this world of becoming not just a writer but an author is entirely different. One of the seminar speakers, a published author, compared becoming a writer to becoming a brain surgeon. Very different crafts, but each must train diligently for years to learn their craft.

If anything, I learned that the road to publishing has many side streets. Numerous roads can lead to publication. But the one thing that separates writers from authors is that authors have the courage to submit their work. Subject it to editing, review, critique, killing, recreating, rejection. And I heard over and over again, all who submit will face rejection. The more submissions, the more rejections. But publication cannot happen, obviously, without that step.

Before that step, however, comes heaps of research and preparation. One word that was tossed around often was “platform.” Writers need a platform because potential publishers and agents and editors want to see that they’re standing on something other than pure skills. They want to see marketing plans, vision, networking, previous publications, a solid following of readers. I thought of my blog, with its ten followers, and then, I have a lot of work to do. That’s not exactly what you could call a solid following. But it’s just as true that every writer starts out somewhere, usually somewhere small and insignificant.

Echoes from a prophet reverberate in my head, “Do not despise these small beginnings” (from the Bible, Zechariah 4:10). Small beginnings. Another facet of learning how to see the great and valuable in the small and insignificant.

From Zumba to Nia

Sometimes, life's little cancellations are just what we need. You know, the ones where you're cruising down a Seattle street and see the "Road closed" and orange detour sign right before you come an inch from slamming into it. And you're annoyed, because that road you were going to take was the most efficient for your commute, but the detour winds you down along the waterfront, opening up before you a panoramic view of Lake Union from a park you didn't know existed. You pull off the route and park your car in the gravel, barely fast enough to scramble out the door and out onto a wooden bench in the park, beside the smooth calm of the lake. A front row seat and a moment taken that you didn't realize you desperately needed, to catch your breath and open your eyes.

As silly as it may sound, that happened to me tonight at the gym. I skidded into the reception area of my athletic club to check in for my Thursday night Zumba class - a high energy, cardio salsa and international dance class - and barely missed the words on the small chalkboard, announcing, "Zumba class cancelled tonight." My face dropped.

I looked at my Zumba friend next to me, "What? No Zumba...?" I didn't know what to do. I wasn't mentally prepared to stay and bore myself on stationary workout equipment. Turning to leave, she suggested we try out the Nia class instead.

I debated silently, though my face certainly didn't hide my lack of enthusiasm. "Uh... Nia? Have you actually done it before?"

"Yeah, once. It's not too bad. Let's try it."

My only impression of Nia was peering in on a class of older ladies, middle-aged granola ladies, young hard-core yoga ladies, dancing in flowy shirts and hippie pants, a blend between tai-chi, ballet, and a zen-like free-for-all. Not exactly Zumba. Not exactly in my comfort zone. But I felt like dancing, and curiosity won out.

So we took our shoes and socks off and waited in the back of the cozy studio, in front of the mirrors. The teacher came in, welcomed us to the class, and briefly explained that Nia is a compilation of three different types of martial arts, modern and jazz dance and some other types of movements I'm not familiar with.

The music invited us in, slow and rhythmic, enchanting, beckoning. Self-consciousness shed off like a discarded garment in a warm room. My eyes closed and I let my body lead me wherever the music danced. Eyes opened, and I saw myself in the mirror. Tightened muscles gradually loosening, limbs flowing in graceful femininity.

"Feel the joy of movement," our teacher instructed. My arms and hands, legs and toes, understood it before my mind did. The mind can be a little slow, but it caught up. Muscles and mind relaxed into the freedom of joyous movement.

Turns out, I didn't need high-impact, energetic routine tonight. I needed barefoot, graceful, creative, spontaneous, joyful, free.

In the face of a man

"Thanks makes now a sanctuary." Ann Voskamp's words from One thousand gifts ring in the space between ears and heart now on a daily basis. I felt myself walk in on several moments such as these with customers in the last few days. Sacred, holy, don't-trample-the-daisies sorts of moments. Take your shoes off, open your eyes. These are the moments to tuck away and savor.

A moment like this.

My eyes find his, dark and smooth as the espresso that daily beckons, before he steps into line Monday morning behind the regulars awaiting their morning caffeine. The gentle man, the one who makes the weekly trek from British Columbia to Seattle for chemotherapy, the one with the peaceful eyes and the strong heart, whose skin bears the colorful marks of cancer's treatment. I send him a nod, pleasantly surprised. He’s usually here only on weekends.

He steps up to the register, orders his tall Pike Place brewed coffee. "This cup of coffee - specifically, this roast - is the only thing I taste all day."

Frozen in place, my brain waits to register this new information. A brave smile crosses his face, an accepting shrug lifting his shoulders, admitting, "It's a highlight of my day."

My mouth opens and closes like a guppy fish, my smile not so brave, in a moment recalling all the things that pass over my tastebuds on a daily basis without truly being savored.

With the luxury of no one behind him in line, we chat for a few minutes. A few minutes of story, his life before it changed drastically. Once a successful entrepreneur, in both Seattle and Canada; then, cancer invaded. One cancer, then another, pillaging life, nailing a grim prognosis to the door. And yet. Heavy with hope, born on the broad shoulders of that three-letter word: Yet. This man refuses to let cancer have the final word. He's studying now for his MBA. He knows what the statistics say, what the doctors say, and still he says, "I'm a firm believer that miracles happen."

My head bobs up and down, an emphatic yes. "Me, too, I wholeheartedly agree." And in my heart, and in my prayers, yes, yes, yes! I want to proclaim it on his behalf from an impossibly high mountain: YES!

This moment, this man, this face, these words, play on a large screen in the theater of my mind all day long, compelling prayers I can scarce clothe in words. Compelling thanks for yet another moment of life, for gifts like health and taste that may not always be; for unexpected teachers; for God in the face of a man.

Seeing the unseen

Living in each moment as grace, fully present in the now, with eyes and heart wide open, requires retraining. Self-coaching to the soul.

A dear friend and I were catching up on each other's lives last night. A rare treat. It didn't take long into speaking and listening to our stories to see a common thread: we're both hungry to learn to live full of joy in each moment we've been given, with what we have. And this, we're also learning, can be a full on wrestling match.

What is that balance, we wondered, between being honest with what we're experiencing - the anxiety, depression, fear, anger, sorrow, you name it - and still seeing the joy?

I shook my head, "Whatever it is, it's not easy." And I thought, maybe it's in the seeing.

Yes, it might be in the seeing. During the work day, it can be easier for me to live in the moment. I'm pushing down what seem like intrusive emotions, putting them up and away on the shelf for later study. I'm coaching myself to stay here, live here, give here. But when I clock out and I slip down into the driver's seat of my car, fasten my seatbelt and point my way toward home, that book on the shelf opens up. Sometimes, it falls off the shelf.

Eyes open, desperate searching, I want to see, I must see. Anything. See the beauty in the ugly. I strain these eyes, grasping at whatever glimmer of glory I can capture. But some days, the eyes brim with tears and the sunglasses go on and I step inside the door of my home, slump to the ground and whisper blurry-eyed prayers.

Where is the beauty in this moment? This weak and crumpled moment. I've been here before, many times before, and struggle beneath the water to break the surface and fill my lungs.

I breathe in, breathe out. In thanks, out thanks. The breaths come slower. I'm aware I'm not alone, held by invisible arms, leaning on Someone I can't see. The thanks come harder, clearer. My heart rests, finally.

Through the blurry eyes, I see grace. I feel grace. I am held. Joy is right beside me, waiting to be touched. In plain view at all times, but not plainly seen.

I'm learning that thanks opens my eyes, and in that opening, I see joy.