A Still Life…A Life Still

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”                                                                             Anne Lamott

It was worth it, yesterday, at 4:35 p.m. to arrive at the Sullivan’s Island post office, IRS envelope in hand, to find that my favorite USPS outpost with the helpful cheerful post people had closed at 4 p.m.  It meant I got to backtrack across the yawning causeway, crawl through Mt. Pleasant  traffic mayhem, toward the much busier and grouchier main PO, where I had to fight for a parking space and shimmy inside before they locked the door to become the LPILLOTD (last person in a long line on tax day).  It  meant I got to stay in the car long enough to catch the brief NPR interview with Anne Lamott, who shared Easter week reflections.

In typical deadline daredevil mode, I watched the clock digits slip to 4:57 as I sat in the PO parking lot listening to her calming dreadlock voice, matted smooth and mangy from years of hard living and praise singing. Lamott tells it like it is, dishing out deep thoughts with hilarity and compassion and no hint of bullshit sentimentality. She spoke of “being Easter people in a Good Friday world,” a world reeling from quakes, Kadafis, tornados and rogue, naughty neurons. She recalled the sober words of her friend Pammy, who told Lamott on a shopping trip just two weeks before Pammy would die of breast cancer (in response to Anne wondering whether a certain spiffy little dress she’d tried on was too tight around her hips), “Annie, you just don’t have that kind of time.”

What is Easter time? I didn’t have the time yesterday to lolly-gag in the PO parking lot listening to the radio, but I did anyway. I don’t have adequate time for most of what’s important to me. My “time” at my mom’s gets spent doing chores, scheduling caregivers, worrying, changing the cat litter — the heavy lifting of daily life, the equivalent of trying on a tight black dress.

As Lamott says, “Easter is about the resonance of (Pammy’s) simple statement…  that when I stop, when I go into contemplation and meditation, when I breathe again and do the sacred action of plopping and hanging my head and being done with my own agenda, I hear that, ‘You don’t have that kind of time,’ you have time only to cultivate presence and authenticity and service, praying against all odds to get your sense of humor back.”

Today, like a child hunting for hidden jelly-bean-filled eggs, I’m going to find time. Take time. Spend time. Recalibrate time. And hide it to find yet again.

~ by Stephanie on 04/19/2011.

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