The Clearing
I am named for my maternal grandmother’s favorite sister. Straight from the Irish sod and homesteaders in South Dakota, I bear both the stories of glory in facing hardship and adversity, as well as the profound experience of loss of homeland and fear of what might come.
In my DNA is her story — both by genetics and because I came to know her through her own words. A number of years ago, her journal was bequeathed to me through my South Dakota kin, and through her words, her trials, her fears and her faith — she has become a torch-bearer for me — a sort of mid-wife of fighting on behalf of those without voice.
Frequently, on those small pages of carefully formed manuscript, she uses the image of the dust storm as an analogy of the whirl of what took up residence within her spirit and the necessity of finding a clearing in the midst of the storm.
The storms of the plains have a particular force and power that is unlike others because of its longevity and apparent irreverence for any attempt to hasten its conclusion. The image drives home as I think that it’s nearly a year since I realized that the global pandemic was not something that the US indomitable spirit could suppress by avoidance. It shut down the work that I love, claimed the lives of people I have cherished and has forced a “winter of discontent” marked by wondering if the the fields will ever again flourish.
I read recently in Bridget Lyons- Rye’s journal, ” My spirit whirls like the storm that sweeps over our land. It carries me deeply into my soul where I must refuse to believe that this is the end. I hold fast to the trust in the Clearing.”
One of my favored meditation practices is to sit in stillness and imagine that I am a pebble being dropped through the layers of water from mud to silt to murky to clear — not in rapid motion into transparent waters — but slowly moving through those layers into something new.
I want to be moved quickly from the mud into the clear waters of clarity, but I am reminded again of the journey that Jesus illuminates with his life. This movement through the dust-storm to the clearing is one that requires time, tenacity, perseverance and trust in what we cannot see.
To be people of the clearing means that we are willing to sift through the dust storms within — to let settle the sediment through which we have passed and to be willing to make space for something new.
“Coming into the clearing” wrote my great aunt, “is not to see things as they were before the storm, but to see things as they are because of the storm. We see what is now, what can be, and not what was. In the clearing, there is no going back.”
In this Lenten time of awaiting the Clearing
I hope to make some room for what I might see
Not to go back or long for what is gone, but…
to get ready for emergence
Ready for a little “mountain climbing” tomorrow?
See you on the Sabbath!
Bridget
