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Once , when my life was crashing into the rocks, I signed up for two weeks in August in a New Hampshire monastery. It was a desperation move, an attempt to position myself in a place where God might find me more easily, speak to me more clearly. But it wasn't working, maybe because God knew that given the chance I would have rather been on Nantucket with a boyfriend. Day followed day, like a series of empty buckets, It was hot. The scenery was unspectacular - farmland and woods. . Whenever I tried to take a walk, gnats hovered in little clouds before my eyes, as if they were deputized to obscure my vision. Back at the monastery, I couldn't find any books that interested me. Looking out the window, I watched a cotton nightgown and a pair of long-johns on the clothesline gently lift and fall together with each new breeze, like a contented married couple. Togetherness and contentment were mirages that dissolved whenever I got closer to them. In the last three years, I had ended a marriage, fallen in love, suffered a broken heart and broken someone else's. Now my latest relationship was coming apart. Even the monastery's laundry line reminded me of my failures. Before the week was over, I decided to go home. I wasn't any good at monasteries. The silence only made it easier for me hear myself think about all the mistakes I'd made, people I'd hurt. Why prolong the torture. That evening, while packing, I heard a knock on the door. It was John, one of the monastery's younger residents. . He had a book in his hand. "Don't go," he said. "Some people who come here stay too long and some people don't stay long enough. It isn't time for you to leave yet." Then he handed me the book - a collection of Emerson's essays which he knew I loved. "My gift to you," he said. I emptied my suitcase and put my calendar back on the desk. I would stay, but I no longer expected any miracles. The next morning, while sitting on the back porch staring into space I saw a ghastly tableau being acted out in front of me - a long thick garden snake hanging from a tree branch, its jaws clamped firmly around one leg of a frog which was still alive. I jumped up and tried to scare the snake into letting the frog go by throwing twigs at it. . But I might as well have tried to rearrange the clouds. The snake had business to attend to and the frog was it. Unable to pull the two apart, I went inside . But for the first time since I had arrived, I felt as if I had seen something horrible but important. Was the frog good and the snake evil? Which one did I identify with the most? I have felt as helpless as the frog, but I had played the snake as well, and there they hung, like a metaphor for my life, locked together in the monastery garden. The next afternoon, , I lay down upon the lawn behind some hollyhocks where nobody could see me . I rarely cry, even at funerals. But I could feel years of unspent tears racing to my eyes. I was so sick of myself. Weeping with frustration and self-pity, I muffled my sobs by burying my face in the grass,. Then, suddenly, something caught my eye. It was a bug, no bigger than a speck of pepper, but so brilliantly marked , with tiny, burning drops of gold and red on a lacquered green body, that it took my breath away. What a lot of trouble for such a small specimen of life..and he wasn't alone. The grass was teeming with fellow travelers just as brilliant and unique. I had been lying on top of a kingdom that was seething with beauty and for the better part of the hour I propped myself upon my elbows and lost myself in wonder. Could it be that we must literally be hurled to the ground before we can see anything beyond ourselves clearly? The second week was much better than the first. I sank into the silence as if it was second nature. My mind ceased its chattering. My my ability to focus upon the moment got stronger. On the last day of my stay, I took a stroll around the garden. It was late afternoon. I sat down upon a tuft of moss. Directly in front of me was a mulberry bush. All of its leaves have been chewed off , leaving it nothing more than a collection of twiggy branches. "Poor thing," I thought, "eaten away by life." Then the light shifted and what I had not been able to see before was now impossible to ignore. Spiders had replaced the leaves with cobwebs. Every twig and branch was rigged with silvery threads that caught the sun and filled the mulberry bush with brilliant light. So, I thought, this is how good and evil work together, how adversity and grace combine. It was the final and most important message, and if I hadn't been looking I wouldn't have seen it. The next day I left the monastery for home. My buckets were full. |
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