Beauty on the Backroads

It is 6 a.m. and I’m sitting on my porch, mug of coffee in hand, watching traffic whiz by as my thoughts keep pace, one after the other, fleeting snippets of to-do lists and reactions to things I’ve seen, heard or read. This, my ritual for a month or more now, an antidote to the hurry I feel when my feet hit the floor each morning. So much to do, so much to do, better get started.

It is my place to press pause before I hit the fast forward button. Fifteen minutes of nothing but sitting on the porch and drinking a mug of coffee, birds and squirrels for company. At first it was work to stay put. I am a person in one of two modes: constant motion or total rest, seldom anything in between. And the first hours of the morning are, in my mind, for doing, not for being because I’ve just spent hours asleep.

Until I found myself overwhelmed at the start of each day, with to-do lists too long and a day unfolding in multiple directions and a need to just let my mind wander and my body be still. Fifteen minutes, I promised myself, difficult at first but now I want more.

It is my favorite part of each day, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when the weather turns too cold for early morning porch sitting.

—

I hesitated that first morning back after a week in Illinois, wondering if slipping back into a routine I’d established was actually a good thing. I had taken my coffee to the porch most mornings while at my parents’ house but it’s a different experience when the kids wake early and there are other adults getting ready for the day. Returning to my porch in a new month as the summer winds down almost felt like a step backward, as if I should be creating something new for myself, some new rhythm, some new practice.

New, new, new. It’s a constant striving, at least the pull of it is ever-present. The world is tugging us forward and upward with promises that new and more and bigger are better, that visible outward change is a sign of new growth. (Church, I’m thinking of you, too.)

Forward, forward, forward. No looking back. Onward to the next thing.

Maybe we like the idea of straight lines because they show progress. Look how far we’ve come!

But I wonder if there isn’t at least a season of our lives, a time in our development, that is more like circling.

—

We stood in the cemetery near my grandfather’s grave, three adults, two kids, one baby, the same place we’d stood two years prior when we’d said our earthly goodbyes, still missing his presence in our lives. I thought about the great-granddaughter we held, the one who wouldn’t know him in this life, and how life goes on. It’s trite and overused but where my grandfather’s life stopped, ours kept moving. The cemetery is full of similar stories.

I took my kids to the other side of the hill where my paternal grandfather is buried, a man they know only from pictures. He’s been gone almost 20 years. Two plots away marks the grave of his son, an uncle who died before I was born. I told the kids what I knew about both men. I don’t know why I felt like I needed to show them these gravestones and tell them these stories. Maybe because it is part of who they are, part of their history.

On this most recent visit to Illinois, I learned from my dad that one of our ancestors was an early settler–a homesteader–of the land where the airport now sits. This awakened something in me, a desire to know more of where I come from so I can know more of who I am. It is a look backward but no part of our family history is unimportant. It all shapes who we are and what we become.

Maybe instead of timelines of our lives, instead of family trees, we could draw circles and where our lives overlap with other family members, the circles could interlock, like the Olympic rings. I’m not an artist or good with shapes but I think I can picture it.

—

I want to grow as a person, to change and be different. In some ways it’s inevitable (hello, post-baby body and 40-year-old hair and skin). Looking at pictures of myself as a child, as a teenager, as a college graduate, I can see all the changes, not all of them good but all of them what they are. This kind of growth and change is obvious and nearly impossible to stop.

But the other kind, it’s harder to see, harder to measure. Is it only good if we’re further from where we started? Is it only change if we can see it? Is it only growth if we’re moving?

I’m thinking of trees and how they are rooted in a place, how some growth we can see (branches stretching to the sky) and some we can’t (roots spreading out beneath the ground). How they cycle through the seasons, how winter looks like death to a tree but is only just a time of rest and replenishment.

I am thinking of our garden, which has been a struggle this year between too little rain, too much rain, and a tangle of weeds we cannot control. This is our third year with the garden in the same place. It is possible that we have stripped this patch of land of its nutrients. Maybe it is time for a rest. Or some fertilizer. (I think there is another metaphor here.)

And I’m thinking of airplanes, these magnificent machines that transport humans from one place to another through the sky in a matter of hours. They cross the country and the globe, sometimes circling the same routes, accumulating miles but always needing a place to land.

Always needing a place to land.

—

At 6 a.m. on the porch with my coffee, I have found a place to land. No matter the circling I’ve done the day before or the miles ahead of me in the day to come, I am there, in the same place I was yesterday, different and still the same.

We need not fear the circling, the routine that takes us from one day to the next. Even if we cover the same miles we did yesterday, every day is new and different or has the potential to be. Maybe we feel stuck in the same place but the change and the growth we seek is happening underneath. Maybe it’s a season of rest.

And maybe we just don’t see it because we don’t take the time to land.