Mietzke's POST Holden Adventure

We have been in Santa Barbara for approximately eight weeks now. We left Holden and traveled for a month and have been attempting to adjust to life on the outside. We live in a duplex in a nice neighborhood. We have two cats and a fully fenced yard. There are so many adjustments we are making. Food is a huge component of our transition I had forgotten how hard it is to continually find meals that we like and want to eat out here. There are so many food choices that it is overwhelming. Community is another place where the transition hits hard. We miss the daily light hearted interaction that Holden provided. We have met many kind people here but connecting with them in the space of a busy of the week where everyone has a myriad of commitments and friends that it is difficult to make time for more. How did we do this before? How did we find enjoyment, community and quiet amidst the hustle and bustle of daily living? Did we ever have any balance or were we always swept along with the current of daily living?

I talked to my friend Melissa Who just left the village a short time ago and we were talking about how hard it is to jump back into phone use, to feel available all of the time to everybody, and the feeling of obligation to answer the phone and call people to connect. There isn’t a lot of leeway. People want answers and are really frustrated if they don’t get a hold of you.

Until I left Holden I didn’t realize how comfortable I had become with my own quite thoughts. Even though the village is very active I had long stretches of the day where I worked alone or silently beside others. I grew to love the quiet and the sounds that you hear when you are able to just be. It is loud out here. You can hear and feel the business, and the expectation.

On Wednesday nights we have begun to have a small service of prayer in our back yard. We have been singing some of the chants from the prayer around the cross service and read poetry and scripture. It began just our family, my brother and his family, my cousin, my parents, and now a couple of new-ish friends. We have dinner together before hand and then take about a half and hour to just be together in prayer and thanksgiving.

I have made it a pattern to come home from work on Wednesday to cleaning and preparing our yard for the service. We have a very large pine tree in our yard that drops needles like crazy and I spend a half an hour raking up needles and setting out chairs. It feels good to prepare. It was something that I loved about having the worship assistant position at Holden. I was fed by the preparation for worship which put me in the mindset of looking to God in the details and in the greater picture. Everything, from the straightening of the chairs, thinking about the songs and readings, decorating and lighting the candles before the service, and being present with all of the different people who helped to lead the worship at Holden brought me into a space of mindfulness and attentiveness to Gods gentle presence. What an amazing blessing to have been a part of that every day for eighteen months! It was such a place of deepening for me. Erik was also an amazing teacher that helped me to read and look at things in a new way and to open my thinking.

As I adjust to outside living I ache for communal daily expression of faith, and I am wondering how to continue living those moments of preparation. All day today I have been thinking about my daily routine, and asking myself how can I really live into the sacred in the hear and now, in the midst of work and family, cooking, helping with homework, watering the garden, cleaning litter boxes, trying to make new friends and keep up with the old…grocery shopping, trying to find time to exercise… How can I find the sacredness in all of that?

In the morning we awake to the sound of an alarm then start to stir after hitting snooze several times. Then we start the day waking the children I shower and come down to make lunches and gather all of the things I will need at school. The girls eat breakfast and gather their lunch’s backpack’s and instrument’s and give long hugs to kitties before they are picked up at school. When the carpool arrives I pray on their heads and off they go… Once they have left I generally have five minutes to say a verse or read a meditation for the day before I head out of the door myself. All of this is a preparation…What If I could experience it as sacred instead of just another thing to do, to fit in.

In my classroom there is a daily rhythm of preparation that happens before the children arrive at school. We set the chairs in a little circle, and bring out the lavender oil and brushes (we brush the children down with soft horse brushes when they come into the classroom and sing a little song of welcome) We pour warm water in the bowl to wash their hands and set out a towel for drying. We boil hot water for tea and set the pot to steep and we set up the day’s activity and begin cutting vegetables for our soup, or cooking the rice or baking the potatoes. I practice the songs that we will sing during our circle time and practice the little verses. I think about the story I will bring to the children and I spend time making the little puppets who will carry the story as I tell it. Then all of the teachers gather together to say a morning verse and to say a blessing on our day, our school and our world.

Then the children come and as I am thinking about it, isn’t my time with them also a time of preparation, a time of support for growing bodies and minds? Isn’t my whole day from start to finish just an extension of preparation for living mindfully in the spirit of love for practicing virtues of patience kindness and hope? Couldn’t this preparation, this whole day of being awake and alive, also feed me and open me to God’s grace living in the daily rhythm? I get caught up in the “idea” of tasks and forget sometimes that it is in the daily experience in the Rhythm that we find peace, meaning, love and purpose. It is in all of the little things that the spirit of God resounds and love is kindled and fanned through grateful preparation.

It is the grateful part that I seem to struggle with most and it is really just my own perception that leaves me forgetful, and fearful. When I allow myself to enter the experience, to let go of doubt and hold onto the moment then I experience gratitude and see the depth of what is being offered to me through the little things. Maybe in this I can take a piece of Holden with me and honor each task as a preparation for love.