Life has been incredibly busy for the last several months. I really try to be intentional with our time, making sure we have plenty of quality family time, good unstructured down time, and time where nothing is scheduled so we can rest. However, the pace of life of the last several months has spiraled exponentially out of control and the first things to get cut are always- rest, down time, and meal time (things we literally need to survive). My husband works two jobs so that I can stay home with the kids. However, I take on our side jobs like managing our rental house and breeding puppies. I am a teacher at heart, so I love that I still get to home school my kids a little with the hybrid schedule we worked out…however, that means there are three school schedules I coordinate. We decided we have to move forward with building our house, even though the market and prices have tripled (yes, tripled) since we started looking into it a few years ago. We are doing several things on our own to try to cut costs and well…I understand why people say to focus on your marriage during a remodel, ha, if only we were just doing a remodel. We had a wonderfully long goodbye with our foster baby of 9 months. I’ll write much more about her later. We were so grateful to have a transition of 3 months to prepare ourselves and our kids as best we can to say goodbye…however, the constant back and forth, packing her just to unpack her, having an emotional “last” night just to have her for another few weeks definitely got exhausting. Throw in there, my husband being gone for 3 weeks in June for an international training, health issues with each of the kids at different times and extra trips to the doctor for various appointments, multiple vacation trips mostly right in a row for reunions and to help my dad re-roof his rental house, a couple unexpected deaths and the travel and support we try to give to the bereaved, and all the normal kid’s birthday parties, summer bbq’s, the communities we belong to that have regular meetings- like our marriage group and a Bible study group- and those that don’t, but that we want to remain committed to and… I broke down crying more than once by the feeling of overwhelm that permeated these months. When I have had time to think, top of my mind is discerning how to not let life get this crazy again, because this is not sustainable. However, the hard part, is not having any good answers. We have to work obviously, I really do love getting to homeschool my kids (part-time!), the house build will take another 9 months but will eventually finish so we just have to power through this season with that big project, we feel called by God to continue fostering and are committed to this way of serving, and the rest of the things that have been keeping us crazily busy are the people and the communities we love and I just refuse to let those communities go or lose touch with them. I think it is often, the people and communities that get cut, when people get busy and I understand that, but it’s part of what makes our culture so sick- what is the point of everything we do, if we don’t have time for the people we love??
A few comical days, just to give you a snapshot of some of these days. I know the mothers out there will appreciate these stories. There was the day where I had just gotten home from picking the kids up from school, when my husband has the electric razor ready for me to quickly buzz his hair because he has to race to get on the road for his weekend of drill (I usually do it the night before, but I had fallen asleep on the couch at like 8). I had gotten him a coffee for his travels, so set it on the counter for him and said, “ok, we’ve gotta do this quick because the people who own the stud dog are showing up any minute.” I hurriedly started buzzing his head, when the cord from the razor knocked over his coffee, as I’m trying to clean up the coffee mixed with bits of hair the doorbell rings, my kids of course answer, and we are introduced to the nice family with coffee and hair all over the kitchen and my husband’s head half-buzzed. Or there was the day that was my son’s last day of school Mass in the morning, we got back just in time to meet the appraiser, she’s walking through our messy house as my kids are bouncing off the walls and the baby is crying, I feed the baby a bottle and my phone rings so I answer and am holding the phone in my shoulder and bluffing my way through questions from the bank that I don’t understand and are making me feel very dumb. We were leaving the next day for the funeral of a family friend, so I had been desperately sending out texts to teenagers to find someone to stay at our house and watch the puppies, when I remember my son is late for his last google meet with his public school teacher…where is my son? They’ve been quiet since I kicked them outside while the appraiser was here. I find them covered head to toe, and I mean head to toe, in mud from the corner of the garden I left them to do their own digging…needless to say he missed his last meeting. Or the time the lock on our interest rate was expiring (we had to refinance before we could get a construction loan, because why would anything just be simple?) so the bank sent a mobile notary to our house on a hot summer evening. I brushed all the crumbs off the table as she sat down with the giant packet of important documents. I have no idea what I was putting my signature on since every other page was interrupted by someone fighting, whining, spilling something, getting hurt or the baby crying.
One thing about being a parent is that you are never alone, ever. I love people and I love being around people, but I also NEED to be alone sometimes. This past weekend, my husband and my son went on a father/son camping trip. I took my daughter to my sister-in-law’s house and drove to the Cataldo mission. It’s the oldest church in Idaho and it is now a state park. I thought I would share my experience of my one-day silent retreat in hopes that I will encourage you to take a silent retreat for yourself. My counselor told me that it is in times of stress, that self-care is even more important…but also even more difficult to find the time, let alone extra time for self-care. I think it’s true for our spiritual lives, as well, in times of stress and feeling depleted, it is even more important to be filled by the source of our strength.
I stayed up until midnight the night before cleaning the house and packing to prepare. I knew I would not want to come home to a cluttered, messy house the next night. I woke up early, I’m not a morning person, but I was that excited for this day…somehow we were still later than I wanted to be getting out the door. As I drove the hour to my sister-in-law’s house, all my responsibilities seemed more and more urgent. Am I really leaving that one puppy we have left all alone for a whole day? Crap, I totally forgot about calling that person back. Ugh, I haven’t even looked at the kid’s school supply list. Maybe this was a bad idea- I need this free day to get so many things done. Strangely, my anxiety also started peaking the closer I got to my destination. This would be the longest my daughter has been away from me or her dad. Their house is right off a highway, what if she gets too close to the road? I haven’t heard from my husband, what if they got into trouble? So many thoughts making my mind start to spin out of control. Ok Amy, take deep breaths, name the things you’re grateful for in this moment, remember the things your counselor said.
I arrived at the Cataldo mission, a place I used to come with Gonzaga students who take an annual pilgrimage here. I walked into the doors of the church and was greeted by a friend who has become very dear to me in recent years- St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits. (It was just an image of him, in case, you think I’m hallucinating, ha). I owe a lot to this man who came before me 500 years ago. He has taught me a lot and deepened my spiritual life in many ways. This church also owes its existence to this man. My university and countless others, much of the northwest itself. There are a lot of stereotypes about missionaries, some of them true, and some of them completely false. Many of the first Jesuits who came west were not colonizers in the least. The Native Americans taught and befriended the Jesuits who came here and built together this incredible building painted with huckleberries and handmade with intricate details. In this tall church, I felt small, in a good way. The anxiety left me. I began to pray and started to cry. I had wanted to cry and even thought about what songs I could look up on my phone that would get some tears flowing, but I didn’t need any of that. I had, what St. Ignatius calls, the gift of tears, not a lot, but just enough to bring a sense of peace. I prayed for the many people and situations on my list (yes, my scattered brain needs a written down list), most especially our Little Flower and our house building. I heard clearly that she is going to be ok, that if I love her this much, He loves her even more. I gave our house plans to God and told him, whether it’s the money that will now have to be spent on the house or the house itself, it’s all yours. Don’t let us use it for just ourselves, let us use it for your will. I finished the last pages of “Searching for and Maintaining Peace” which was a profound read, and thought I heard God tell me to leave the book here for the next person, so I did.
After an hour of being in the church, I walked outside to the view of the mountains and the stream and called my soul friend back. Yes, I planned for this to be a silent retreat, but I also planned to catch up with this particular friend who nourishes and puts my soul at rest. We talked for two hours and she did just that, as I sat in the shade, feeling the breeze, and overlooking natural beauty.
I had packed my journal, a Bible and a book to read, but I needed more silence. When I was a junior at Gonzaga I went on a 5-day silent retreat in the winter. On the second day, they asked us to put away our books so we could really enter into the silence. We were still trying to fill the emptiness, they said, and they were right. I walked slowly down to the stream. A hummingbird paused in front of me for a few seconds, and I can’t tell you why, but I think it was my mom’s way of saying hi, as she came to my mind in that instant. I walked on in a slow rhythm, feeling more in rhythm with the earth than I have in a while. Everything was buzzing and clicking and humming and gurgling around me- so much life lives around me! I walked on, finally feeling my head begin to clear, and with clear space, there was room for other thoughts. Walking has always been a consolation for me and a source of creativity and I think this is a fairly universal experience. My brother walked “El Camino” in Spain and he and his friends would say, “la vida es el camino y el camino es la vida” Our life is one big pilgrimage and, maybe it’s when we’re walking that we’re most in tune with this reality. The verse, “beside still waters he leads me,” came to me and stayed with me awhile and I experienced a bit of what David must have- in between his crazy life of wars and battles, God led him to still waters. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I was filled with gratitude thinking of the people I’ve encountered these last several months. These people who, yes, have filled my life to the brink, but filled it with such goodness. How could I have been thinking of complaining. There are so many people who are so lonely, and, somehow, I have multiple communities, multiple people who think of me, what a grace! I continued following a small dirt trail and wondered who walked this path? Then I thought of how much I owe to so many people who have gone before me. I can be so arrogant sometimes, assuming I would create something so much better, so much less flawed, than what past generations have accomplished. How can I not thank, even those I have never met, for how much has been passed down to us? I recalled a friend mentioning, “thin places” a place where the line between the divine and earth is thin and I thought, surely this is a thin place. This space where strangers became kin, where worship was shared between cultures, where history was made, yes, this is a “thin place.”
There was a little wooden sign for the cemetery and, bam, just like that, my anxiety came back and I reached for my phone to check on my kids and even considered turning around. No, Amy, keep walking, you can’t run from death, you can’t lock it away in a room where it’s never thought about or you’ll never be free from this anxiety. I arrived at the very small, very old cemetery and I stayed awhile. Can a cemetery be beautiful? It was. I thought of their bodies nourishing the ground and the words of Ash Wednesday came to me, “remember that you are made from dust and to dust you shall return.”
I walked on to a dry grassy area, the wind was blowing through the yellow grasses and the grasshoppers were making their rattling noise…would I hear a rattlesnake over all these rattles? Ew, I wonder how many ticks are in these grasses? Wow, I am far away now from the park and really alone. What if I run into a man out here? Ugh, is there anywhere I can be where I’m not afraid of something?? I used to be so fearless. What happened to me?
Messages about both my kids and my Little Flower came in. They are not just good, they are doing great. They are better for me choosing to be healthy and better. I was back where I started, at the church. I had circled the whole park, but I still hadn’t had enough silence. I did the same trail a second time. I learned long ago, doing the same thing again and again is not necessarily the curse we think it is. It is in repeating, that we progress. I remembered holding our Little Flower in my pouch (a wrap) and walking in circles to put her to sleep. They really do grow so quickly. What a beautiful season we had with her. I followed the still waters, paused again at the cemetery, and walked with confidence through the yellow grasses.
I think about telling people that I spent the day journaling or reading. Would anyone understand that I spent the day in silence? I’m already such a weirdo for so many other reasons. But no, I need to be honest about what happens when we are emptied- it’s the only way to be filled with something else. I recall taking my students to 20 minutes of silent adoration in our little chapel. “That was so uncomfortable I felt like crying!” one student tells me. When noise and hustle are our norm, being still is uncomfortable, at first. I guess it must be, or it wouldn’t be powerful. If we never stop racing, we don’t have to consider what is the point of our race?
Soon, I would need to go pick up my daughter, but I wanted to end my day inside the church. My book about peace was gone and I smiled. I looked again at this handmade church, it is the details to the craftmanship that are the beauty. I think of how two completely different cultures learned to understand each other by their shared worship in this building. They found something that transcended their differences. I go to get my list of people I’m praying for in my purse, but then I remember- stop filling the silence. So, I sit in the same spot I sat this morning. But this time, I listen, rather than speak. “Come closer.” I go closer to kneel at the side sanctuary and look at the tabernacle that used to hold the true presence of Jesus. I see no red candle lit, so I know the host is not currently in the tabernacle, but even still, this tabernacle has held Jesus’ body before. Then I see what I couldn’t see from where I sat- the details painted around the image of Jesus- little angel babies, and behind the tabernacle pink lilies adorned the wall. And I heard, “thank you for watching over my precious Lilly. You did all that was asked.” And again I was given the gift of tears. I had worried so much if I had given her all she needed to move on and continue to thrive, and in one moment that worry was erased. I looked up to an image of Mary stepping on a snake. Had I really been scared of a rattle snake an hour ago? What silly fears we have. I didn’t have many words beyond, “thank you.” Thank you that you have helped me seek the things that bring joy, even if it makes me feel crazy, at times. So many people are wasting time seeking things that ultimately bring despair. Thank you for this crazy, joyful life. As I was standing to leave the ranger came in saying, sorry I have to lock up, actually I should have locked up 10 minutes ago, but I got caught answering questions. I thanked her for preserving this place and smiled for every little minute I was taken care of.