The King is in My Field

This field I’m standing in, it’s nothing like the one I imagined with such optimism only one year ago today. Back then, I imagined the rows with the hint of a smile. I sketched the pattern for how I would plant, I imagined myself dipping to the ground to drop each seed in thoughtfully, lovingly, purposefully. I imagined the blossoming greenery of my mindfully-improved habits, and the tender shoots of next-level attentiveness in my relationships. I imagined that the King would come visit me in a field that looked magazine-worthy and I would be proud of what I had to show him.

I imagined all that under blue skies with the confidence that there would be seasonally-appropriate rains to bring to fruition all my hopes and dreams.

This field I’m standing in - it’s not edenic, it’s apocalyptic. It’s rows are haphazard, chaotic. It’s hard to even tell what’s plant and what’s weed. Things I had hoped would flourish are snapped off and brittle, if they’ve even pushed through the soil at all. And things I never, ever, ever dreamed would be in my field are there in abundance, with all their spiny brambles reminding me that they are there and they will keep being there, and they will grow and spread even more if I do nothing about them and that trying to uproot them is going to be very, very painful.

This field I’m standing in is one I barely recognize, with fault lines like huge scars - terrifying me with the reality that what I assumed was stable is, in fact, floating and shifting, clashing and subsuming.

And somehow, I will have to give an accounting of all this.

I’m standing in this field, trying to shake myself out of a state of shock, absently moving my hoe through the dirt and debris.

The King is coming.

What can I say to You? What do I have to show You?

He draws closer and now what? Any other year, I’d make sure He would see me busy, see me planning and planting and fussing my way towards the patches that needed some extra attention. But now? I feel unable to invest effort into anything that requires cognitive assumption of a secure tomorrow. Tend something? Who knows what tremors may rock the ground beneath me between today and tomorrow? Who knows what fury the skies may unleash that will slice off all my progress at it's base? I know I'm supposed to be busy making something beautiful out of this corner of earth He's entrusted me with, but I just can't seem to find any rhyme or reason in the pandemonium around me and it feels a little too far beyond fixing.

The King is in my field, and my feet feel too leaden to even take a step forward to greet Him.

There’s only tears now. Tears cutting a path down my dirt-caked face. I’m-Sorry and How-Could-You and If-Only and Next-Time all meet and jumble in my mouth and when I open it to speak, nothing comes out but a sob. I can only lift my hand a little to motion around me at the disappointment that my field has become, and when I see Him looking at it - looking at it deeply like no one else can look at it - I don’t even have the strength to stand before Him anymore and I’m on my hands and knees in that hateful field pounding my fists into the soil and grief-wailing incoherently.

The King is in my field. While I’m crumpled over the dirt, He is here with me, tenderly plucking a tiny sprout from the earth and holding it before my eyes. The new-green life, all hopeful and high-reaching; I trace it from its leaves down it’s stem and to it’s genesis: it’s broken heart. All that is growing here had its beginnings in a shattered shell, in the loss of It’s facade of structure and order. I’m reminded that it’s true - that that’s the nature of all that lies beneath the verdancy of vibrant life - a broken-hearted seed.

The King is in my field full of broken pieces. I don’t know what to say to Him except just to take the tiny sprout back and plant it again in the earth and wordlessly beg Him to give me the courage to patiently wait while it flourishes and grows straight-backed and strong.

An Open Letter to Covid-19

Dear Coronavirus,

Wow! What an rise to fame; a regular overnight sensation. You should be very proud.

I have to warn you, though. Your experience within the human population is going to be quite different than the good old days when you were living it up among the pangolins. I know that a big part of your act is that you move in and help weed out the weakest among the herd. It's a great service that you offer to nature; but here’s the thing - humans have figured out that there’s irreplaceable value embedded inside those bodies that are not as strong as everyone else’s. There's an immeasurable worth that has nothing to do with the desirability of their genetic transmission and everything to do with the transcendent spark of the divine that glows inside them.

You may find this hard to believe - in all your forays around the animal kingdom, I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like this, but - we humans will fight tooth and nail to protect those who are old and sick. We are willing to deprive our young of their social lives, to suffer trillions in economic damage, to temporarily suspend our constitutional right to assemble, all in the hopes that we can slow you down. We’ve got some epic life-saving equipment in our world - but our nightmare scenario is having the number of sick outpace the number of beds; sending sick people home to die because we ran out of ventilators is an option that frightens us more than the prospect of shutting down entire industries and sparking a worldwide economic crisis.

It’s just not going to be as easy for you as it once was. You are going to go looking for the next human host and come up empty for awhile because - paradoxically - we love one another enough to stay away from each other for the time being.

Gosh, I’m sorry to have to break this to you after you’ve already come this far. Don’t feel too bad, though. You’ve inspired some legendary memes and epic toilet paper shortages, which is more than most viruses can say.

Bon Voyage on your journey back to eventual obscurity.

Sincerely,

The Human Race

You'll Never Guess What I've Been Doing

It's become my favorite story to tell: the one about the day I came home after a community event where I'd hung out with a fitness addict friend. I told her, proudly, that I'd been doing yoga regularly for the past few weeks. She told me, nonchalantly, that she had just finished her morning run of 6.5 miles. My jaw dropped and to cover my sudden workout inadequacy, I said something along the lines of, "Good for you. I hate running."

That didn't deter this friend at all. "You should do a 5k. I'll run it with you. We'll find a Sunday race and do it."

Of course, my gut reaction was, Ha! No way! Because my idea of an endurance sport is to tread water for an hour-and-a-half while holding my current novel above the water level so I can be entertained while I swim in place (Yes, my one fitness achievement I brag about). But there was another reaction layered beneath that one: You think this is something you cannot do. Therefore, you should do it.

So, I said yes, okay, I'm in, let's do this. And there was that spring in my step on the way home when you have something new and exciting awaiting you and I walked in the door and announced to The Engineer, "I'm going to run a 5K."

Whereupon he burst out in hysterical laughter that continued for the next five minutes.

If I didn't really want to do it before, I definitely wanted to now!

So, I downloaded a 5k training app and set my alarm for early enough that I wouldn't broil to death under the deep-south sun and I got out there. Five minute walk to warm up. Perfect. I can do this. And I listened to my audiobook - the one by the moral psychologist - while I walked. Then, through my headphones came the instruction to run. So I took off in a dead run. 45 seconds and I thought I was going to pass out. I couldn't breathe. Walk, came the soothing voice of my app trainer, and not a moment too soon. I limped forward for another minute before being told to run again, so I pounded the pavement for another 60 seconds, feeling again that there was no way I was going to be able to do that again. But that's what the app told me to do, over and over and at the end I was this close to puking.

A few days in, I texted my sister-in-law:

-You'll never guess what I started doing this week.

-Running.

-How did you know that??!!

-I just thought to myself, what's the one thing that Jessie has never had any interest in doing?

This is a testament to how established a fact it is that I am a non-runner...and to how well my sister knows me.

Fast forward two months or so, past a run with that same sister who actually knew what she was doing and showed me that what I actually need to do is jog, not sprint; past hours of watching YouTube runners tell me how to make it just a little more efficient; past the few times I tried to run with the Engineer and and he zoomed ahead and did push ups while he waited for met to catch up (It was a real toss up whether I was more annoyed or impressed by this).

Past the milestone of running an uninterrupted mile. And an uninterrupted two miles.

Past the days in between where every foot strike was an exclamation point at the end of a mental I HATE THIS!

Past the hours that I've blasted Jocko and JP through my headphones - although, really, maybe that's actually the most important part of this whole endeavor because as my lungs are burning and my calves are aching, I am making space in my day to activate Discipline Equals Freedom in my body. I am starting off my day with an acceptance of suffering as a path to growth.

Pause at today, at the moment in my run just after I had turned around and started towards home. I had just passed the guy with the huge backpack going the other way on his bike (we nod at each other now), I glance up at the pair of little old Chinese ladies with their dramatic arm swings, walking together on top of the levee...and at the other pair of Chinese ladies a little further down. I note that the middle age woman with the Marathon Finisher t-shirt is out again today (I suddenly notice these shirts now and the superhumans who wear them) and despite my inner coach shouting at me to pace myself, I feel bound and determined to pass her. And I realize that, for the first time during a run, I am thinking:

I love this.

I love the feeling that, despite the fact that I've always insisted, "I'm not a morning person!" my body now thinks that 7am is sleeping in and some of my most productive hours are before the kids get up.

I love the feeling that, despite the fact that I've always insisted, "I just can't run!" I am out here, over a mile into a run, going painfully slow, but still going...

I love the feeling that all of these people out here on the levee have been on to something all this time and I've finally been let in on the secret.

I love the feeling of pushing back the boundaries of my self and becoming something I never thought I could be.

I know, it's small. It's just a 5k. But I've always been a cynic when it comes to the idea that people can change. It's something I want desperately to believe, but when I see people eternally stuck in the same ruts year after year, I kinda start to roll my eyes at the idea that humans can change themselves in any sort of meaningful way - and then there's a heart-stab when I realize that I'm also one of those stuck people.

I'm deep into planning for the coming school year, amassing piles of books and making lists of skills acquisition that need to be prioritized. And, as happens more frequently than I'd like to admit, I hit a wall one night when I looked from the pile of books to our schedule and realized that there was no way we would ever get to all of these and ohmygosh am I being derelict as a educator because Blue will not get to the Illiad this year, and Orange is not ready for grammar because his reading is far from fluent, and Green wants to learn coding but how in the world will we fit that in?!

And it took a series of deep breaths (and just throwing up my hands and making a sno-ball run with the Engineer) to get my feet back on solid ground and remember that learning is incremental. It's wading a tiny step at a time into a vast body of knowledge and your progress seems so infinitesimal that it's almost non-existent.

But then, you look back at the shore and are shocked at how far away it is and you smile a little bit when you realize that all those tiny steps really did add up to something of great significance.

Whether it's learning the basics of botany one flower at a time, or gaining one new word of of a new language, or doing one more rep of that workout move that feels like it's going to do you in, or running a minute longer than you did the last time, or waking up earlier than your gravity-prone body wants to because your soul tells you that even though the calendar says this is just an ordinary day, you know deep down that there are important things you have to do that just can't wait...

...any one of those actions, in singularity, may be insignificant. But day after day, in aggregate, they lead to the definition of you being tweaked, changed, and maybe even unrecognizable from the person you were before.

So, the moral of this, my new favorite story, is that small, consistent steps can lead to unbelievable change. And if you're still skeptical, meet me out on the levee tomorrow with the sunrise and we'll run together.

P.S. And the other moral is that if you hang around a friend like Lilach long enough, you'll eventually find yourself sweating through a workout and wondering, "How in the world did she get me to agree to this?!"

P.P.S If you need a daily reminder of this idea while you are doing the abovementioned sweating, here's my favorite way to get it: