The Blessing of a Pause

I have just returned from a week in Phoenix Arizona that I spent with my friend Susan and her family.  Susan and I were college roommates over 50 years ago and continue to be close friends even from a geographical distance all these years.  I have spent at least a week with her every year for over twenty years and it was disturbed by the pandemic. But last week I was able to fly there and just "hang out."

What I recognize this morning is that there is a gift to just going away from my "regular life."  It is as if I am dropped into someone else's life for a week and then return to myself. The flight over the United States is a transition and I come back to  familiar tasks of home that reorient me to my life.  I am picked up by a friend, have pizza with a daughter, do my week's laundry, pay a couple of bills, greet my dog Ginger and sleep in my own bed. 

Now this morning I come to this computer to reflect on the gift of a pause.  I feel replenished and refreshed and ready to continue living into my own  "wild and precious life."  (referencing Mary Oliver's poem The Summer Day).   Especially since retirement, I have had this understanding that we each essentially construct our own lives with the decisions that we make about how we spend time and money and attention.  The pandemic has been a bit of a pause as well.  Because of it I stopped doing some volunteer work and other activities like weekly movie viewing.  Now that we are coming out of it, I find myself wondering what to bring back and what to eliminate from my life.

The gift of the pause of this last week has been to return home in appreciation for what remains in my life.  I am blessed with family that lives nearby and friends who are supportive and work in the church and through spiritual direction that is very fulfilling.  I am also blessed with living in a home that feels like a womb and a safe place for me for  now.  I hold everything lightly as I know that health can change everything, but in this moment it is good to be home and present to my life's blessings.

Here is that wonderful poem by Mary Oliver.  

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?