The Earth is Resting
This morning when I went to the dog park nobody was there. It was raining for the first time in many weeks. Poor Luna was soaked and sad. She’s not accustomed to wet weather or an empty park; she was cold and missed her dog pals. She wandered around the park, stopping at the corner entrances in the hopes of finding a canine companion.
After about fifteen minutes, Arthur arrived with his dog Pricilla. Arthur is an older man, maybe 65. As I waved to him from across the park, I bellowed, “I’m glad you’re here; I thought nobody would come today because of the rain.”
He looked up at the sky with an wide-mouthed smile. “It feels like the Earth is resting,” he said opening his palms to catch the rain. “The earth is resting.” As a lover of words, I immediately tucked the phrase into my memory like I might wrap up a scumptious piece of cake in a napkin to save for later.
The Earth is resting.
This morning when I got out of bed, the power in our house was out. I lit the gas stove with a match and made cowboy coffee. Upstairs Nancy struggled to put her contact lenses in in the dark. We had no choice but to take things more slowly on this dark, quiet morning. When Nancy came downstairs she said, “I don’t feel like going to my exercise class.” She was getting the universal message to rest today as well.
Hearing Arthur’s open, easy explanation for the rain, “The Earth is resting,” comforted me. If the Earth, our mother, is resting and the power is out and Nancy needs a break, maybe there is some rhyme and reason to this great big chaotic universe we live in.
Last week I had a conversation with Lucia and her boyfriend about religion. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but we found ourselves in the car talking about our belief systems and what, if anything, god meant to each of us.
Lucia’s boyfriend said, “I can see why people might be religious so they have some kind of guidance for living, some kind of moral code.”
“I think god is the connection between everything — people animals, the plants and oceans, all of the natural world,” I said.
“That all makes sense,” Lucia said, “but I’m still not sure what I believe about god.” We continued talking about how religion makes understanding god hard because, if god is good, why do so many horrible actions take place in god’s name.
I find that, as I near the sixth decade of my life, I’m closer to understanding and accepting god. When I was younger, I felt uncomfortable being in the grey zone. I felt a pressure to know what I believed and be able to articulate it. In college and into my early and middle adulthood, the question was always, “Do you believe in god?” And the answer was always, yes, no, or I don’t know. But I didn’t find myself with many opportunities to talk about possible interpretations of what god might mean.
These days I gravitate towards books and podcasts about how and where god shows up. I am drawn to different philosophies and perspectives. There’s so much possibility and there’s no one answer. I am solidly in the grey zone, but I have some clarity. I absolutely believe we are all connected. It thrills me to see the connections in my daily life— from buying the exact right amount of brown rice to fill our rice jar to exactly full to getting a text from a long-lost friend at the moment I was thinking about them to waking up without my alarm at 5:15am to witness the most gorgeous sunrise all summer.
I find comfort in connections. This morning’s trinity of the power outage, Nancy’s exhaustion, and rain from the sky affirmed my belief that we are all connected. The connections are not always obvious, but when I notice them, I feel a sense of hope for the world. In some inexplicable way, it feels like, in that moment, everything is okay, like we are all breathing as one, simply existing together, in harmony.
