Josephine Robertson

For a year now there have been no jazz clubs to gently paper over the inside of our well with the creative jam of others, patching up the chinks in our leaky old cistern with music dark and sweet as syrup. There have been no delightful discoveries: the little restaurant you’d never seen before between 2nd and 3rd street behind the grocery, the one with four tables and the owner who dances about with his special hot sauce festooning your plate with the taste of baking Spanish hills. We can stand at the edge of them and curse the lost harvest, lament what isn’t growing, or we can sit down there in the warm furrows and smell the weeds, feel the thin summer sun on our face, crumble the soil between our fingers, learning its texture, its taste. Seen their enthusiastic messy blooms, their first green leaves, the sacrament of their fruit slowly ripening in the long hot days of August, and the tender offering of fall drifting down to feed the earth.

And above it all the steady drone of people rushing from point A to point B. A half a million people (in the United States) have died in the last year of a virus we’d never encountered before. We’ve all be conned into thinking that productivity is the highest goal, that being busy means growth and learning, and that what we’re used to is “normal. And when the next year (or whenever we begin to win over this virus) is over, and you’ve visited the people you haven’t seen in too long, and rested, and spent time in the woods listening to the trees gossip, and at the shore feeling the sharp sweet edge where worlds meet; don’t stop. Once the God of the Israelites called not only for rest once a week (every week, even when the project deadline looms) but a year of rest, for people, animals and even the land every seven years.

Now is perhaps the time to note that not all spiritual practices are fun, sometimes the spiritual work we have to do is hard, and we don’t see the results for years. Solitude isn’t something we get much chance to practice in the modern world. That doesn’t mean we aren’t lonely. We too can make a choice to deepen our connection to the divine, to the natural world, even to our fellow humans while we isolate physically.

Far enough beyond my one little human brain that the math for me being right doesn’t add up. You don’t have to be totally caught up in the wonder of the Divine to be a little bit mystic. You might tape a note to your computer to remind yourself that all those wonderful, happy, crabby, annoying people you meet online are little imago dei (God bearers) as well. Try it for a few months (change takes time) and see if practicing some of the qualities of a a mystic brings a healthy kind of humility to your practice and life.