Herons and Aspens

On the forty-five minute drive back to Longmont from Westminster on Friday, I realized that I had not written a blog entry in two weeks. In the strange vortex of grief, part of me feels like more time should have passed – time so ballooned with a spectrum of emotions – and part of me wonders how two weeks already passed, three weeks that were in practical ways unproductive, a daily commitment to just one foot in front of the other, following the small increments of the line. What exactly did I do for two weeks?

Nothing came to the surface for a blog entry, and I thought about writing about nothing until near the end of the day. There is a liquor store on the east side of Longmont called Fox Hill Liquors, recently taken over by new owners who are unexpectantly welcoming. On my first visit, the lovely East Indian woman called me by my first name when I made a purchase. I felt like her friend immediately, as if we already knew something intimate about each other. On Friday, I stopped by on my way to pick up the kids, always a funny sequence of events because I feel like I’m picking up contraband, Alissa, our daycare provider, being Mormon.

One of the wine displays was a French winery, Heron, and I thought about this majestic bird, catching glimpses of one on the Chesapeake Bay in the wee hours of the morning as I sat in the seven seat of crew boat, seeing one fly over Golden Ponds in Longmont. If I was a bird, I would be a heron.

In high school, a friend, Chris, was filling out a multiple choice personality/ideal career test. The only question I remember is, “If you were a flower, what would you be?” My mom, Chris and I laughed after he read the question – especially because the friend was male and, though sensitive, still quite male and an adolescent. But I think these days, if I was a flower, I’d be a red poppy.

A few months ago, my pastor, EC, who is also the soon-to-no-longer-be Board President where I work, and I drove to Boulder for a non-profit awards luncheon. On the way back, we were talking about politics (or, he was talking, good preacher that he is) and mentioned in the conversation stream Barbara Walters’ first interview, which she rather flubbed when she asked Nixon, “If you were a tree, what would you be?” EC thought this a ridiculous question to ask. “Oh,” I laughed. “I don’t know. If I was a tree, I’d be an aspen.” It’s a perfectly fine question to ask.

I am reading Richard Rohr’s, “Everything Belongs.” A Franciscan monk, Rohr talks about small mind and big mind, small mind being what we tend to have in the West, analytical, detail oriented, at its worst, clinging mind. Big mind is more Eastern, able to float in mystery, connect with that which is bigger. This helps me realize one thing I miss now in my “religion” and connect to in my faith, something I feared in church, where the mystery, mystical, something bigger, inexplicable and only feelable, fantasy “fits.” I love children’s books, like “Goodnight Moon” and “You Are My I Love You” that take us out of the concrete, sensical on language and words. They are feelable.

So I put it out there – if you were a bird, a flower or a tree, what would you be? Ridiculous questions that I wonder about. Perhaps part of big mind, nonsensical. At the very least, a little humor to round the sharp corners of recent events.