Open to the Spirit
Today’s word: Chaos
home, I also made sure to be realistic, leaving plenty of space for other learning: free time, family time and hoping for good weather, a few hours for walks and play outside each day.
I wish I could say that my kids have flawlessly kept to the schedule we created. The reality is that we vaguely follow it, but we do seem to have a good mix of activities even if they are not at the same time of day we originally intended. Yet the biggest challenge is the chaos that has crept into each day. Sometimes there is just too much going on, not only in our house, but in the world. We simply can’t keep on track. As parents, we have to watch the kids, get work done, and also pay attention to the daily stream of bad news headed our way. We have a constant feeling of anxiety, and of course no one knows when school will start up again, or when things will return to some sense of normal. In reality, I know that keeping any sort of schedule these days is tough. When nothing is for sure, and when so many of us are filled with anxiety and fear, we all have to just live day to day. It is tough, but we try to flow in the flexibility that is necessary when living through this crisis.
This chaotic world we live in now will eventually calm down. But when the pandemic is over, our goal needs to be to put everything back together, to make order from the chaos. It will be hard to make sense of our lives, and to try to figure out what this will have done to our society and our world. The process of cleaning up may take time. And I know that when we do eventually get back to our normal schedule, back to work and life, nothing will be the same. Current truths and ways of being will no longer make sense, and we will think about so much of what we took for granted in new ways. It will be up to us to create a new world, to form a more hopeful, more whole society out of the chaos of the pandemic. It will be a fight, and it will involve many sacrifices, but this is the only path forward.
) My favorite image of chaos is the cacophony of the orchestra just before a performance, musicians tuning up, practicing each a different bar or two of the score, flipping pages on music stands. The conductor steps to the podium, raises the baton and suddenly all is silent. Programs and feet stop in mid-shuffle, whispering ceases. All is suspended an artful moment before the baton is lowered and the air floods with exquisite sound and an elegant order reigns.
With the gift of unscheduled time, I’m revisiting how language acquisition occurs in infancy - fascinated with how the newborn brain, programmed to sort through a jumble of random sounds, determines that certain ones have particular meaning. A phenomenal feat! Call it miracle or the work of linguistic genius; all of us writing or reading this have done it, some more than once. Image and likeness of the divine, indeed!
Lately my kind of creating order out of chaos is more mundane. Folding clothes from a heaping laundry basket, unloading the dishwasher to restore every knife and bowl to its rightful place. Gathering up stray belongings before the visitor arrives - alas, not so much these days. I used to marvel at how an edible meal could ever emerge from the chaos that was my kitchen. That is, until I moved households. Now with an open floor plan, I’ve learned to keep close tabs on the mess and clean up as I go. These days of self-isolating my digs might suffer from too much attention. Thank goodness I’ve this column and poetry to distract me from endlessly straightening pillows on the sofa or picking up minute pieces of lint from the throw rugs.
It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, but the dust may be settling. Out of the chaos that’s turned our days upside down and inside out, what new kind of order can we make on many levels? Already one gift of this global virus is how nature herself is restoring a certain elegant order out of the chaos we’ve made of her. Let us each seek and find a bit more of that calm that’s said to occupy the center of every storm. Before the baton waves again. ) These days my bedtime is erratic, my snack choices sometimes odd. I often forget what day it is and I’ve stopped counting the number of times I forget who I’m calling as the phone begins to ring. My house is tidy. My lawn’s all cleaned up but inside my head things are quite chaotic. Normally I prioritize my day, with a check list to keep myself accountable, but not much is normal these days is it? Without much of an outside regimen to attend to, my day is mine to do with as I wish, but too much liberty is not always a good thing.
Right now I’m being grateful for ‘autosave’ on my computer. I started this piece two days ago. Today I discovered that I had not saved it. Lo and behold I find I am able to recover it as document 51 in a series of unsaved documents that is truly impressive both for its length and the variety of topics I started writing on and never finished.
Perhaps gratitude is one of the keys to helping us stay grounded in these chaotic times. Take a deep breathe. Feel yourself being present to whatever is going on right now. Give thanks for your breathe, for the birdsong out your window, for every phone call you make or receive, for those who are working to keep us safe, for the opportunity to serve others and save lives, for the gift of life that is so precious and that is ours. Stay in this moment of gratitude and notice the chaos seems to fade into the background. Have a good week dear readers. Stay safe. Stay the course.
One word, four voices - and always your turn next: How do you experience “chaos” in your life, and how do you deal with it?
Rev. Mead Baldwin pastors the Waterville & North Hatley pastoral charge; Rabbi Boris Dolin leads the Dorshei-emet community in Montreal; Rev. Lee Ann Hogle ministers to the Ayer’s Cliff, Magog & Georgeville United Churches; Rev. Carole Martignacco, Unitarian Universalist is retired from ministry with Uuestrie and now resides in St. Andrews bythe-sea NB, but keeps one foot in the Townships by continuing with this column.