On "Being All Here"

"Each one of our lives is shot through, threaded in and out with God's provision, his grace, his protection, but on the average day, 

we notice it about as much as we really notice gravity or the hole in the ozone."  

Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

Can I say that, so far, this blog is not at all turning out to what I had thought it would be?

To be honest, I'm not really sure what I was expecting but it wasn't this.  Most of the posts have ended up very different from what I thought they would be.  And, I had hoped to be more consistent than I have been.  I'm not sure if this is good, a sign that I'm following where the Spirit would lead, or if it just means that I'm a loose cannon on that storm tossed ship, The Internet.  I guess only time will tell.

One thing has been exactly as I had hoped though.  Blogging has forced me to slow down and pay attention.  I am tired of living life in a blur and my title, Being All Here, is an attempt to focus my brain, my thoughts on the here and the now.

Being a historian, I have a strange relationship to time.  I love it and yet I hate it.  I tend toward looking backward or looking forward without really looking around right now.  And, being a goal/task oriented personality, I have the hateful (to me) habit of blowing off present in favor of the past or future.  Anchoring my brain in moment is very hard for me.  Add to that what Ann VosKamp calls "mother-tired" and I turn numb.

Also, I am a handful of short years away from the Big 4-0.  This is a good thing but it is a little sad when I think that last decade of my given moments has simply evaporated.

Dash-1 (helicopter speak for the first helo in a formation, or in our house, the first child) is eye level with me now.  His hands are as big as mine.  I cannot keep his feet in shoes.  And yet, when I look at him, I don't see my Man-cub, on the rim of that vast and thrilling canyon of teenager-hood.  I see my little man; feeding cheerios to the dog from his high chair, lining his Hot Wheels on the windowsill, trying to hold his squirming body still to tame his wild hair.  That baby boy is gone, in a good way, but gone just the same.  I don't remember much of the intervening years.

But blogging is helping me to push aside the crowding voices and be in the minute.  To slow down.  To think.  To rest and to be here.  To hold on to right now so that I can actually remember it later.  To become a deeper person.  I can't write about something without thinking about it first and I'm liking this side effect.

One of my all time favorite books is Mark Buchanan's The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath.  I've read it at least 20 times and find something new every time.  In it he says:

"Being in a hurry.  Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me.  I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry.  But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all that rushing.  Through all that haste, I thought I was making up time.  It turns out I was throwing it away."  (emphasis added)

Yes.  THAT.

I'm slowly learning to:

~Let go of the hurry and the task.

~To pay attention to the tears when the brush gets caught in Dash-2's hair.

~To listen to the Christmas songs that Dash-3 sings as she colors, in February.  Or to watch and smile at her self-invented, yoga-ish routine she does in the living room.

~To notice when Dash-4, the baby, is entirely too quiet and intervene before it becomes a massive mess.

~To take pictures of....whatever, to help me see it, really see it.

Hopefully, eventually, I will do these things not because I might blog about them but just for the sake of marking them in my conscious.  But for right now, Being All Here is helping me to be all here.