Last week, I wrote a few words in praise of The Slow Life. And you responded.
So many of you said you live in just the same way. Or try to. Or want to. And I was pleased. Maybe even a little smug in my self-satisfaction.
And then ice blew in on the wind, and I learned something: my vision of the good, slow life is highly dependent on hot coffee in the morning. And hot tea in the afternoon. And cozy heat in the radiators and running water in the tub. And, well, creature comforts of every kind.
But there are days when the carpet of your usual choices does not roll out at your feet. Days that do not begin with hot coffee and do not end on the sofa watching PBS with your husband.
What does this slow life look like when we are not comfortable? On those days, is the slow life we crave even possible?
On our first day without power, I spent many hours reading on my old pink settee by the light from my bedroom windows. It was cozy under a blanket, and the baby took a good nap. The cold hadn’t yet settled into our bones the way it would on day two.
But I wasn’t comfortable. I was on edge. Every few minutes I would hear a rending, cracking sound, and I would sit up looking left to right, left to right, trying to see which tree was losing its battle with the ice this time. When a 120-year-old maple tree loses a limb, that limb is still the size of a large tree. And those large trees fall with a grinding sound of splintered wood, and a crashing sound of falling limbs, and the shattering sound of a shower of ice.
When I lived in Chicago, I would often come across a sweep of broken windshield glass glittering on the sidewalk. Sometimes, I would find more and more of it leading from car to car and on to my own car parked on the street with a startled look where the front windshield once was.
Late in the day, I took a short walk, and I remembered all that broken glass. By then the temperature had warmed to the low 30s and a lot of the ice had dropped its hold on the trees and scattered in the wind. You could see it everywhere, great sweeps of it sprinkled on top of the frozen snow.
I stepped carefully, shielding my eyes against the glittery light, and realized that the whole sky must be made of glass, like the windshield of a car.
And someone had taken a hammer to it.
There are quiet days and there are days we are convinced someone, somewhere is wielding a hammer.
And, honestly, I’m still waiting for whoever’s in charge to put down the hammer because the suitcases we packed when we decamped to a hotel have disgorged their contents in every room like last night’s dinner, and I’m sick with a cold and a pounding headache, and they say another big storm is headed our way.
And yet, I still want to say this: there’s a still point in this turning world. On the quiet days it grows in us, we welcome it into our hearts with coffee cups and dinners together and hours with a book and bedtime stories read by the fireplace and candlelight at breakfast just because.
And when the hammer falls, and the sky does come falling, that still point doesn’t leave us as we duck and take cover. It’s still there in our hearts and still out there in the world. Leaning over, catching our breath, we might spot it.
To me, this day, it looks like one splintered tree fallen just to the right of my car and one splintered tree fallen just to the left. It looks like another tree lying broken just beside the kids’ playset and another huge limb right beside the henhouse.
Looking around, I would swear that no trees fell on this hill.
They were placed.
(Also, my husband says he’ll slice the old maple wood into pretty round platters for serving bread and cheese, so there’s that.)
I was just thinking about what I like most about your writing style. And that is after reading this post, I feel like I was right alongside you during the whole experience.
Larry, your comment makes me very, very happy.
Another wonderful piece. I resonate with this. Does it seem like the moment we think we have the recipe for happiness and satisfaction we get the interrupting knock on the door that says, not so fast? He usually gives us most everything we need and most of what we want or so it is in my life, but thankfully he doesn’t let me think it is my recipe for satisfaction that satisfies. Thank you for giving your words that remind me of this. Hopefully your slow life will return and the joy for it will only be all the greater.
Thank you, Dan. So much wisdom in your comment, as always. You have a knack for helping me to understand the very words I wrote (because, yes, sometimes I write an experience without fully understanding it; actually, I imagine I do this all the time).
There is a still point in this turning world. This is the home I want to live from. Thank you, my friend and I’m sorry about your gorgeous trees!
Oh, Summer, I hadn’t even thought of the still point as home, but, yes, yes, exactly.
“And when the hammer falls, and the sky does come falling, that still point doesn’t leave us as we duck and take cover. It’s still there in our hearts and still out there in the world. Leaning over, catching our breath, we might spot it.
yes, this! may we ever find our still point in Him
Deep sigh. Your words often fill me with inspiration. Yes, to all of this. The test of our true peace, where we find it, truly does rest in the inconveniences of life doesn’t it? Your imagery in this is so lovely Christie. I am watching rain fall out my window while at the same time watching the temperature gauge as the trees become limbs of glass and sway with the wind. It’s making me a little uncomfortable from my vantage point. So sorry about the limbs already broken but thankful for the fingers of God to select where they land. He is truly faithful in all things.
Look at you, you stealth Eliotvangelist. If you’d said, “Go read ‘Burnt Norton’ today” I would have mentally jotted it on the imaginary to-do list and maybe remembered it at midnight and felt a pang of failure and then let it slide on down the list of undone to-dos. Felt it as both good intent and obligation, like homework. But somehow this mention of the still point incited a longing for both understanding and source of this still point. So I Googled. First hits? Various pages about Still Point spas and Still Point yoga. Lord have mercy. Eventually, though, there it was. A few lines from the Four Quartets. So I just read all of “Burnt Norton,” as if for the first time.
“But do not call it fixity.”
I’m visualizing the vanishing point in a perspective drawing, all lines converging at the point where the eye can see no farther but the mind knows the lines continue.
I think that still point is not a tangible thing, yet it resides in tangibles. The “dust on a bowl of rose-leaves” (which I happen to have — well, a jar of rose leaves — on a shelf in my bedroom). There, in the home. There, in the avenue of trees, and the limb lying broken, and the cheese platter to come, wood without end, amen. There, in the disarray of the suitcase, still point toted from cold house to warm hotel. There (speaking of finding shelter) in the kick of a baby in some ox stall’s food trough, still point in a turning world if ever there was one.
Oh, Laura, your comment is a work of art, and I am going to read it over and over. If Eliot’s poetry is an ocean I can swim in, your words are the scuba-diving gear I’m taking with me. 🙂 Also, I feel a million times better about the suitcases that are still lying in half-opened heaps. Because, yes, how could I not have realized, the suitcase is a still point with a handle just right for carrying. Wood without end, amen.
you know you can all always come and stay with us, yes? We have a spare bedroom and a trundle in the boys’ room and a basement full of kid entertainment. Just call from the road if you ever need to. The door will be open.
Lisa-Jo, I don’t know you, but what an obviously kind person you are. I’m sure Christie would agree that she’s fortunate to have you as a friend.
Beautiful imagery. Glad you were able to find warm. Our girls are home again. We have not lost our power thankfully though we have places to go in case. The blessing as been the girls( usually busy teens) being home! I love this gift of time and presence for us.