Slow Transformation of a Typical Neighborhood Dweller

We'll start with three sheep. And a donkey. I need the donkey because in Vermont, sheep are dead in no time without some kind of guardian. He's a guardian donkey. So what if I live in a typical neighborhood with one tiny acre and shrubbery that needs my care rather than caring for me (you know, like fruit trees, even maple trees, would)? It's time to slow down. Some doppleganger got hold of me and now it seems like I'm living somebody else's life, not mine. I thought I owned all this stuff--ha! the big joke is, the stuff owns me!

Remember that time when you were a kid and you heard the grownups talking about furnaces? And you thought, "That is SO boring that there is NO WAY I will sound like that when I'm a grownup!" Well, now I talk about furnaces! and septic tanks! and water heaters! I spend most of my waking hours thinking about things that are boring beyond belief and even quite unpleasant. What happened to joy? I mean, you get to the end of your life, you're dying, and you think back and you wonder, "Why didn't I....?" What's the blank for you? The blank for me is "...find a way to be happy?" I live in the richest country in the world, my children are fed and cared for and have access to (what used to be) excellent medical care, and I burn out my best energy wondering how to get most quickly from the school to the grocery store to the first time-anchored obligation of the day. I'm saying no! to the world. NO! Where is happiness? My best energy, my best intelligence, my best social skills and love I am now going to spend in an effort to slow down, to taste each moment, to savor and understand what is the part of each moment that makes it not a waste of the precious little time that I have.

I believe that when I die, it's over. I wish I believed something different, but there it is, my education and intellect accept only that death is like becoming a broken toy, she don't work no more, might as well move on. I believe that. My belief is a relief over the dogmatic Mennonite beliefs I was fed throughout childhood about heaven and hell, but it is so utterly sad that I envy people who have different beliefs from me. But you know, you can't pretend you believe differently from what you do, can you? Or can you? I've tried and it just won't work for me. Personal integrity says that it's best to believe unless you can't, but if you can't, then call it what it is, hope for the best, expect God to give you credit (if he's there) for having the courage to stand up for your non-beliefs.

But okay, so without beliefs of an afterlife, what am I (and my children) left with? Belief in an eternity, and that eternity is all packed into NOW. NOW is all there is. There isn't yesterday (didn't I forget most of it anyway?), there isn't tomorrow (somewhere out in the eternity of space there is a comet headed our way, our galaxy is on a collision course with another one, and then this whole show is over, gone, kaput, and there won't be even somebody to put flowers on our galaxy's burial site). NOW is about typing the next character--there it went, it's gone, I typed that dash and then it was done being typed and I was on to the next dash and then the t and then it was over and look I'm already at the end of a sentence! Each NOW fleets by and is g o n e like a puff of seeds from a dandelion PUFF they scatter to the wind and five minutes later I'm cooking dinner and the existence of the seeds is forever unknown to any but me but I've already forgotten.

If that is all, just now, just that character I finished typing before I even knew I had begun it, then what oh what is there? here? I think, ponder this every day, thinking about death--not because I like death but because I loathe death more than anything else. Death is the proof that there is no God as I was taught during my years as a Mennonite child growing up on a sheep farm in Pennsylvania. I mean, think about it. Suppose YOU were God? Would you create this universe of dandelion seeds? Would you make everything totally meaningless?

Okay, so maybe that's why somebody invented Heaven. To give us all meaning. If we never die (spiritually) then there is meaning in our Being. Souls that go to heaven are permanent because then those souls carry within themselves the memories of their own existence. They are never forgotten, they never cry "Yonondio!" with all the forgotten lifes that touched our planet and evaporated never to be noticed or remembered.

Personally, I'd like to buy real estate in heaven. I mean, that place is definitely being populated at an exponential rate. And what makes it more valuable, the For Sale sign says: "No comet insurance necessary!" In fact, in Heaven all insurance would be a thing of the past, angst would be a thing of the past, human grasping at ephemeral realities in a constant, exhausting attempt to catch and HOLD meaning now and FOREVER, that would be a thing of the past, and peace, true quiet of the soul, could actually happen.

Quiet of the soul. That is what I want. On our last vacation we were lucky enough to be camping just steps off the beach in Maine. I woke up first each morning. I made tea. I walked to the beach with my tea, and sat watching the waves. The waves, when you are tired and having your first cup of tea, are endlessly fascinating. Watching the waves is like watching the most significant creature that could possibly inhabit the earth--like watching that creature breathe. It breathes in, the waters draw back (look at that odd wave right there). He breathes deep into his lungs, sucking the realities of beaches all over the world into himself, like a vast beast of meaning that draws it all to himself with every change in the waters, and the whole eternal moment hangs for a few delicious and suspenseful seconds while his breath is held, savored, and changed to a vast exhale, a release, a gentle and unimaginably powerful and musical statement of YES existence may go on, and the waves come back in, to grasp at the sands, at the place just 20 yards from where my children (my hearts out of my body) are sleeping. The beast falls upon the beach, but he is harmless, he is still miraculously within the territory that I expected him to hold to, my children slumber safely, and the waters take what they want and withdraw, leaving everything changed behind them. Every grain of sand at the surface is overturned, bubbles rise from bits of sand that looked packed solid, my footprints are gone, and if I am lucky, my toes have been kissed by this fascinating creature who teaches me something with every breath.

Sometimes I think that, were it not for the children, I could stay on a beach and learn the breathing of the ocean forever. But after forever and no time at all, I hear the strange multi-voiced crunch crunch of little feet on the sand, and a child who would be really irritated with me if he read the above comes close and raises his arms for the embrace he knows he can count on from that beast that rules the world for him, his mother. I pick up the child, and his skin is as good as the waves, and I sit down on the beach chair (he is heavy), kiss his head, and hope I can hold him without spilling my tea. And he says, wonderfully, "Can I play video games first thing when we get back?" How anchored I am.

But the sea, the sea haunts me all the way home from Maine to Vermont, and it whispers to me of a place that needs to happen for me. If somehow I can find the eternity of the waves in my life, my life of conflict and divorce and hamburger and a dog that needs brushing and a car that smells bad and a dishwasher that needs emptying and a rug that needs vacuuming and calculus problems that need doing, if I can find the eternity of the waves in furnaces and septic systems and fights among the children over who goes first and phone calls and obligations and oil bills and furnaces and hot water and laundry, if I can call all of these things somehow into submission, so that they bow to the importance of things like waves, if somehow I can find the wisdom or the energy or the freedom or the cleverness or the creativity to say like Max does to the Wild Things, "Enough!" if I can just do that, then maybe I, and I'm sorry but more importantly my children, can suck the joy out of each moment so that it doesn't matter who remembers it, it doesn't matter that tomorrow it is gone like a dandelion seed; the moment was so full of joy in itself in that time that it bubbled over with meaning and significance and love, if I can reach up the sand of memories and happenings like the mighty and confined ocean myself, to draw unto me and my family all the meaning brought to the beaches by rain and wind and tides and people and myriad creatures, then I can lie on my deathbed and I will be so used to inhaling joy out of moments that it won't even occurr to me to look backwards to do something so dry and dusty and useless as evaluate my life. My life will be there, and NOW, and then, not that there is such a thing as then, but then it will be gone and I won't even know it or care. And my children will themselves know how to live and will know then how also to die with the same joy I taught them in each moment, the joy that stands and stands and crumbles before pain but collects itself ultimately and claims a secret spot in the universe for itself from which it can never be cast out.

Where can I find this in my house in the town of Charlotte, VT, with my shrubbery and my roof and the requirements of the school district for my childrens' education?

Oddly, I think I have found this in the smell of a donkey's hide. Mennonite girl that I am, who once breathed the air of barns and manure and ponies and donkeys and sheep with such joy of being that even in an adulthood buried as mine is by septic systems and furnaces one deep breath of the essence of a farmyard can clear the fog from my mind.

So Harry the donkey, Snowy and Miracle the ewes and the as-yet-unnamed little ram sheepling are coming to my house to show me how to slow it all down, to focus on essentials. My instincts tell me that they hold a secret that can help to set me free.