SUMMER 2007Mary Waddington
Salem MM
t had taken Richard and me seven hours to drive to the 2005 Friends General Conference Gathering in Blacksburg, Virginia. We were newlywed seniors only days removed from our spiritual union and not yet recuperated from its preparations, which included moving Richard up from Florida and remodeling my house. The theme of this year's conference, "Weaving the Blessed Tapestry," was also ours as we consciously wove our lives into partnership. The drive down had allowed us to gradually decelerated from high gear to low and to distance ourselves from engagement in all that distracts and fatigues.
Richard was new to membership in our Society and to the Gathering but not at all to Friends testimonies and practices. He strode confidently into this initiation week, with its cast of 1500 characters, knowing there were no understudies. He had chosen the workshop on centering prayer. Mine, on past-life exploration, had chosen me. It would come about that mine provided the drama for this week while his grounded us in our roles. The first two days were palpably healing and they positioned me for unlimited possibilities. I felt like I stood at the top of a spiral staircase that descends within yet accesses the outer.
News of London's terrorist bombings broke over us early in the week just as the morning workshops were beginning. The death count was then at seven. Our little group moved quickly into worship. As we held this tragedy in the Light someone asked that we do the same for the 45,000 who die each day of starvation yet don't make the headlines to capture our attention. I noticed with regret that my sadness was not proportional to these losses, and I blamed it on distance and lack of personal connection. That day I purchased from the FGC bookstore a bumper sticker that reads, "We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness."
As I waited in the lunch line midweek my eyes feasted on people. I began seeing close up, as through a magnifying glass. At first it was just hands, hands that gripped plastic trays and aluminum walkers, and I saw in them evidence of meaningful work. Then it was heads of hair-whether tamed or feral, cropped, twisted or cascading-so enchanting I wanted to touch them. I wondered what had come over me. Then I was captivated by faces. I saw one feature at a time, every detail of it, and each was original, inspired art. Strangely, I felt I was the sculptor and in love with my work. Here was a nose formed from clay with finger dents pressed into it, and there was a chin carefully chiseled to highlight its strength. Next was a cheek scooped and smoothed for the sheer beauty of its flow. An entire gallery was passing before me. But it was eyes, made accessible and receptive, that caused my own to well up. They looked at me directly and generously, and I could tell they were seeing the best in me.
I sat staring at my plate. It held only one modest scoop of rice and another of beans. We were eating the Gathering's annual simple meal that benefits Right Sharing of World Resources. My silent grace was long and self-scrutinizing. Behind closed lids I saw plates with less or nothing at all. I ate slowly and spoke little. Moving through the food lines at subsequent meals I would feel uncomfortable with the amounts and varieties of food, always way more than we could eat, and I agonized over what happens to the leftovers.
That evening the duo Trout Fishing in America performed our all-Gathering concert. We poured ourselves into the seats of the big auditorium up the hill and were drenched in music and laughter. The spirit of play broadcast itself over us like seed and took hold. I couldn't keep my eyes off the audience, which was at once charmed and charming. Twice the stage filled with Junior Gathering groups singing what they had written that morning under the tutelage of our musicians; twice we swelled with the fullness of their innocence and the promise they offer our future. It was at that moment the concert became ours. Sheer delight and the need to express it sucked some of us into the lesser density of the isles where knees could jerk and elbows flap. We were unprogrammed Friends, mind you, and yet it all seemed so rightly ordered.
y the concert's end we had become children. Then, quite appropriately, Richard and I acted in defiance of our bedtime by joining those across campus doing Dances of Universal Peace, circling, swaying, linking and unlinking. It was prayer in motion. Eyes touched eyes until I knew I belonged to each dance and each dancer. I barely slept that night so acute was my awareness, so awash was I in the waves of peace we dancers had created.
The alarm pushed me into a day like no other. I hurried to my workshop anticipating my turn to be hypnotically regressed. Sleep deprivation had stripped me of defenses and expectations. It had emptied my mind and opened me to the unknown. I was ripe for this day. Lying on my back on the hard floor, I closed my eyes and everything fell away but trust and a few stirrings of promise. I followed suggestions read from a script and went briefly to what seemed a life in another time and place. There I uncovered a few shards of information about myself without having to dig. Then, when prompted by the script to move ahead to my death in that lifetime, I slipped abruptly into a Presence so peaceful and loving I was certain nothing else existed or should exist. I floated there devoid of all fear, loneliness, desire, attachment or effort, suspended somewhere between having been and becoming.
countdown brought my awareness back to the room. I opened my eyes and gazed, out of focus, at the ceiling. Bliss ran rampant through me. Gratitude overwhelmed me. It was hard to keep from weeping. When asked to describe where I'd been those last moments, I struggled for words and could only say perhaps I went to the other side of meditation.
Class was over. The room was emptying so I forced myself to my feet. I remember hoping this movement would not dislodge my euphoria. I also wondered why I was disoriented even as I recognized where I was. I sandwiched myself safely between two women who steered me toward the campus green where the Junior Gathering had invited us to "worship and weave" with them. I was tender and defenseless, having cast aside every vestige of armor. I advanced along the sidewalk certain I was in two places at once. It was as though I were inside a bubble of all-knowing, all-loving truth looking through to the outside where familiar activity reminded me I had left my work unfinished. Both places belonged to me. I fervently asked Spirit to show me how to integrate them.
Deposited on the green, I stood alone trying to orient myself. My emotions were accelerating rather than abating. I worried that I would cry and not have the words to explain why. I couldn't figure out what to do with myself so I stood a while longer. I slowly begin to make sense of what was before me. Quakers of all ages milled around a huge three-dimensional sculpture of yarn and sticks the children had loosely woven and attached to branches of overhanging trees. A smiling child handed me a ball of fuzzy red yarn and my first thought was that I should use it to tie myself to the ground. I watched what others were doing and then, with stiff and trembling fingers, I knotted the loose end to a twig above me and begin to move forward. The ball unraveled itself as I wove my body with its trailing yarn around and through all that moved and didn't move. Together we were growing the work, replicating the web that connects us.
I let my yarn ball play itself out while I wandered about searching the crowd for Richard. When I saw him, off to the side, he was tight in a group yet distinctly apart because he was looking for me. I went to him as I had that day we fell in love, that day we knew we had found each other. Stepping over lines of yarn and through people now seated on the grass, we wedged ourselves into a tiny space and settled into worship.
isty rain that had gone unnoticed now lubricated my vision. I saw that a strand of orange yarn had lodged itself on my knee. I traced it with my eyes and could not see its beginning or its end. I held it between my fingers and it became an artery pulsing with the life force of everyone it touched. I could not let go. It became a part of my worship.
Silence had spread over us the way the mist had, unobtrusively, all-encompassing. Both were binding agents, and then came a third. It came as one soft voice in a song of peace and gradually, ever so gently, became layered. Richard knew this song and his voice, deep and true, settled into the others like silt in a river bed. Mine stayed trapped in my throat. Every form of love I had witnessed or participated in these five days had lodged within me and become too big, too precious, too ethereal to be expressed. But then, suddenly, a few tears escaped and camouflaged themselves in the drizzle on my face. And those I still held back blurred everyone's edges and made their colors run together. And then all was merged into one. I slid my arm around Richard's back and felt the vibration of his song. It trembled its way up my arm, traveled through my body and flowed out my fingertips into that single strand of orange yarn resting on my knee that wrapped itself around us and through us and had no beginning or end.
He sat on a chair beside my bed with his elbows propped on the mattress and his huge hands clutching mine, tethering me to something solid and permanent. He leaned into his listening while I sobbed into clumps of words I uttered through lips that were by now sticking together at the corners. But mostly I cried. I cried for the bitter-sweetness of the world I would walk back into — for both the darkness and the Light, for gains and losses, for beginnings and endings, for compassion and the absence of it, knowing I am all of this. I swam in these heavy waters until I was spent. All moisture had left my mouth and exited through my eyes and nose, turning my tongue into a rasp that shredded my words. So I just lay there for a very long time in the silence of Richard's centering prayer. His breath kept moving in and out, predictable, reassuring, warm on my cheek.
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Monday, May 21, 2007 at 11:49 PM
