Soulful Solitude

While in Atlanta, while I was thinking I was on this "business trip", while I was busying myself with the busy-ness of conferencing, something amazing transformed me.

I wish I could say it happened in a class that I was sitting in at the conference center. I wish that I could say, too, that it happened while I interacted with someone who I profoundly admire.

I don't know about how the spirits work -- I only know that that at times there is a presence that is either one of great comfort or one of great sorrow and sometimes you need both to get you to where you are going.

Whether it was the result of a beautiful surroundings, or eating certain kinds of food or getting rest...whatever created/caused it, all I can say it that I'm grateful.

When someone uses words like "spirit" or "sacred" around me, I get all nervous and twitchy, so engrained from my fundamentalist heritage are these words that they've lost their energy, they've lost their power. They tend to be reduced to some flannel-graph imagery associated with scratchy lace from my Easter Dress. Not a fun reminder. Not one that transports one into grandeurs of presence with a great Spirit.

But these moments aren't contained into things we always understand and I guess, because of my heritage, they have to be a bit more resourceful in sneaking up on me and bopping me on top of the head with insight.

And again, I'm grateful for that. As for flexibilty and workability, I'm not always an eager patient. I'm sure that whatever forces worked their way into my cranium this weekend had to work pretty darn hard to get there.

All I know is that there was a moment of such clarity that I had to stop -- literally stop -- in my tracks and look upward.

I didn't hear angels wings and I didn't see any great light -- except for the sun, which was just over my shoulder because this moment - like so many in my life -- happened in a garden while I was quiet and alone.

I believe there are great forces in nature that draw me to it that can shake the dreariest moments from my life simply by thrusting my hands into soil. I believe that these forces can lead us to ourselves in ways that no amount of traditional prayer can ever do so. I also believe that solitude can be a powerful way to connect with the things that matter -- yourself, your God and the things that are rustling between the two. I find that there is no place that I feel closer to whatever the spirit of God is than in a garden.

Today, I'm home and I've already been out in my little patch of paradise, thinking about the spring and what all it can be this year. My garden has waited for me -- like it does each year -- for this moment when I remember it, remember myself and remember the forces that draw me to it. And so today as I walked in my garden thinking about the garden of last year and the garden of the new year, I stopped for a moment and looked upward.

And I'm filled with gratitude and joy.