I might as well have been a one year old in a wet diaper circumnavigating the coffee table, my sticky little hands holding on for dear life. Or an untethered small child with weak ankles wobbling on the ice out in the middle of the skating rink. I might just as well have been Ed White taking the first made-in-America celestial stroll in 1965, an unprecedented walk in the galactic park. That’s what it felt like when I went window shopping the other day in Chatham, New York, a 19th century village with a beloved deco movie theater and a library featuring a Tiffany window. Exhilarated, brave. Chatham is a half hour from where I live in Stockbridge. I’ve been there countless times, but this was different. I hadn’t been out and about mingling with other pedestrians, close enough to hear them chattering, in an entire year. My husband and I made this outing for the express purpose of walking, masked, along the brick storefront-lined Main Street without having to cross to the other side to avoid people, as we’d been doing for a year. We admired fine linens. We stopped to look at displays of cheese. This is what you do when you’ve been vaccinated and you’re celebrating the dawn of a new day.
It was a small thing, this aimless afternoon walk. But it had the quality of a miraculous event like that dancing with the stars in 1965 or the first glimpse of Earth from space photographed by Explorer 6 in 1959. It was a crack in the pavement of reality. I remembered seeing the NASA photo for the first time and thinking that the Earth was somehow in contact with my sneakered feet, but also very far away, a place that I could look at with wonder from a great distance. I didn’t know it at fourteen, but I was experiencing a moment of enhanced presence, a hineni moment. Hineni, from the Biblical Hebrew meaning “Here I am.” In my theology at seventysomething, I’m not saying it in response to a question from God, an entity outside of myself, as Abraham, Jacob, and Moses did. I don’t, as a rule, do duality any more. No, I’m simply acknowledging the remarkable fact of being alive. Nothing fancy, just amazement.
Being liberated from house arrest now, I anticipate more of these moments, although a sure way to be disappointed by presence is to go looking for it. Presence loves a surprise party. It likes to catch you off guard when you least expect it. Yesterday, walking on Old Stockbridge Road, I noticed the sunlight hitting the filthy March snow at just the right angle to transform the ugly remains of winter into a crystalline salt-and-pepper carpet, white sprinkled with the black of the car exhaust. Seventy-five and I had never seen it before. Today, I’m considering grabbing a take-out coffee and drinking it sitting on the library wall, watching the passing parade. Next week, I may venture out to buy my own food and at the end of the month, I will travel to the midwest to see my family. We will celebrate the liberation at a seder with sweet charoset and bitter horseradish. We will dip our parsley in salt water, so that in the midst of the joy of being together, we don’t lose sight of all the loss.
It will be important not to try too hard. The best practice will be to receive the blessing of what comes, no expectations, unlatching the gates of the world with beginner’s mind as if the sight of a green mountain of broccoli piled high in the supermarket were the eighth wonder of the world. How long will this last, I ask myself? Experience suggests that it will have a short shelf life, especially if I don’t respond with the same delight to my own interior dirty snow as I do to the roadside remnants. And here I’m coming up against the reactionary nature of personality. Part of me has gotten used to the limitations of lockdown, the reduced choices, the enforced conservation of energy, the way I’m told people behind bars sometimes become acclimated to prison. I feel resistant to the clamor outside, magnetized by the seductive glamor of doom. I want to see and be seen, but I also want to hide like a tulip bulb in the dark earth, not quite ready to show its face. It’s a new day. The pandemic fog is receding little by little, the sunlight emerging gradually the way it does in California in the early morning over the Bay. But right now in New England, it’s mud season, an in-between time, a liminal time that has its very own bittersweet taste.
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You are an amazing writer, Susie! I felt like I took that lovely stroll with you. Thank you.
"I don’t, as a rule, do duality any more. No, I’m simply acknowledging the remarkable fact of being alive. Nothing fancy, just amazement." You say this, Susie, and as you reflect on the ordinary, like looking in store windows and not crossing the street to avoid others, you shine a flashlight on the sacredness of life, the miracles of green mountains of broccoli and sunlight on muddy snow. And as always, your writing amazes me.