Episode 05 - Into The World

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

 Martha Postlewaite

It was an April Sunday. 8 years ago.  I remember walking with Mark towards the hospital. Everything smelled of growth, the beginning of spring.  When we walked through the doors the entrance smelled like the end, like nothing could grow in here, javex blended with a wiff of roses roses. 

We found the floor, the right ward. Our friend, Ron, was dying. He had worked alongside Mark on our farm for almost 15 years; he was like a grandfather to our kids, he sat in our Prairie Wind Circle for a decade and a half.

For this Sunday, I organized the people of Prairie Wind to gather in his room. 

Ron was an elder to our community. He and his wife, Doris, brought a habit to Prairie Wind that came from their time with the Saulteaux-Ojibwa people from Bloodvein First Nation in northern Manitoba. Ron introduced us to the grandmother/grandfather stone that was to be passed around the circle in the way of the sun; each person would be invited to either hold the stone in their silence or speak their truth.  I remember Ron once telling me, while discussing something about the up and coming Sunday gathering, “it is more important to make a simple room for our truth then make a fancy one for our entertainment.” 

This, our last Sunday with Ron, was a simple room for the truth.  Ron was a wood carver and made many gifts in the form of a bowl or candle holder. I brought one of those bowls to the hospital. we filled up his room into a circle around his bed, and in between singing his favorite songs, each person held that empty bowl, spoke their gratitude and grief, held the bowl in silence before passing it onto the next person. 

To make simple room for our truth….that is my song. To make simple room for our truth through circle...that is how I sing my song into the world. 

I have belonged inside of circle for as long as I can remember:

When I was a little girl, on most Sunday afternoons, in a farmhouse on the outskirts of a small south western Mennonite town called Rosenort, my father’s extended family gathered around the large dark oak dining room table for either a roast beef lunch after church or for faspa, a display of the pantry, for early dinner. On a good day, both.

Before and after the meal, the cackle of cousins would climb trees, play hide’n’seek in the house or barns, sneak away for truth or dare in the basement. 

The given -- when the table was set (and it was always set for everyone, a card table or two would extend into the living room) we sat in that circle, together as the tribe that we were, anticipating exactly what our taste-buds had been taught to anticipate: the crisp sour of grandma’s canned pickles, the chewy whiteness of her home made tweibach, and the salty softness of jelly covered canned sausage. 

Before we were allowed to dip in, Grandpa would have us all quiet. Always perched between an older and younger cousin, I bowed my head to his low german blessing. A short and loving announcement of the importance of what we were doing together and an acknowledgment that any of the goodness we experienced was a gift from God. That home around that oak table was my first and defining circle.    

Looking back...

In my break away from traditional church and my turn to circle, I long to replicate the loyal constant of those sunday feasts as a child, those full embodied play times, my guaranteed place at the table, the ceremony of pause and sincerity that named and gave meaning to our gathering.

I also long to clearly name the rejection and lostness I carried while faltering in the confines and judgment of that very community. In clearly naming that pain, I never want to repeat the destructive hold a tightly controlled circle can do to the spirit.  I always want my room to have large doors that open and windows that face all four directions. 

Echoing Ron, the room we make for each other, over time, inside of the loyalty and surrender, is the simple room that can hold our wild truth: the ugly and the beautiful, the complicated and confused, the shame and the grace, the faltering and the strength, and every little strand between. 

And to be this simple room requires tending and rejuvenation, anticipates renovation and sometimes complete take down. 

Circles, like all of us, like me…need something that Martha Postle waite’s poem doesn’t show or say…an arrow that points us back to its beginning. 

Again and again, we are nudged to look at our temptation with the cynicism and/or the frantic for the grandiose and we courageously go back into the forest of our lives….and begin again and again to be lost so we can be found. 

And here we are together again, Katharine, coming full circle. 

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.