begin
Photo Credit: Laine Lingle
By: Andrea Lingle
Cézanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate.
Wassily Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 17
I work for Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC. Last fall Hurricane Helene hit our area, including our hospital, destroying everything near rivers, creek, and lakes. The staff and disaster relief workers learned to cope with caring for patients without internet, water, and knowing what was going on. Having been on vacation when the storm hit, I was able to get to the hospital to relieve my colleagues who had slept, sweated, and served their patients four days after the storm hit.
Last week, the management of the hospital handed out shirts that read, “we show up.” It seems like a bit of a low bar, but it was all we could do.
There was nothing any of us could do to erase the mud from the art galleries or the trauma from the souls of those who watched people be swept away or the shredded plastic bags from hundreds of trees. All we could do was to show up to listen to lung sounds and stories.
Sometimes it is heroic to show up. To try something. To begin.
When I started homeschooling my children I spent hours pouring through curriculums and programs because I knew one thing for certain, I wanted to pick the right course of study the first time to ensure that my kids would have a consistent, gap-free education. I settled on the gorgeous, literature-based philosophy of Charlotte Mason. All of learning was to be delightfully spun out through “living books.” I would soak my kids in words. Shower them in words. Steep them in words.
Turns out two of my kids are severely dyslexic and another was a very delayed reader.
My plan fit about as well as a twenty year old prom dress.
We adjusted and adjusted and adjusted. We began 180 times a year. I didn’t get it right the first time. or the 538th.
To begin is to commit, to show up, with the ending just beyond the curve of the horizon. To live close to grace is to live close to wonder and far from control. It is to see the sparkle of life in the tea cup even though it might get knocked off the table at the next third grade tea party.
I looked for universal things—perused
The common countenance of earth and sky:
Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace
Of that first Paradise whence man was driven,
And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed
By the proud name she bears—the name of heaven.The Prelude, Wordsworth, 43
Perhaps you have spend your life in one, unbroken, single-minded pursuit. Perhaps life grabbed you by the ears and told you, “THIS IS YOUR ONE PATH! GO THIS WAY.” That has not been my experience. I have begun and begun. I have sat on the cement floor of my soul with tears of frustration running into the corners of my mouth feeling like I have never, not once, finished anything.
And yet.
There is a gentleness that curls up next to me, despite the chill, and waits for me to be ready to try again. The spiritual practice of creativity requires trying over and over and over. It requires buckets of wrong notes and heaps of erasers. The road of pilgrimage is a rutted path from souls showing up to try.
We’re all a work in progress, dealing with the voices filling our minds and hearts with destructive messages, searching for that sense of satisfying contribution, trying new things, all of it out of a desire to find what it is that will get us up in the morning.
Rob Bell, How to Be Here, 71
The thing about grace is that it isn’t proportional to effort or talent. It is a gift. It is the universe yearning to be. When you pick up the brush or the spatula or the mop and bucket and say, “Here I am. Let’s begin,” grace gleefully, messily springs into action.
“Van Gogh didn’t say, ‘That’s just an old chair.’ He looked, and looked, and looked. He sensed the Beingness of the chair.” (Eckhart Tolle)
When we begin, we give grace a chance to trickle into the world, and that is deeply, desperately, necessary. God, the Creator, isn’t asking you to roll out a perfectly devised and executed life, God is asking you to…
dance