Of being fully empty (in a good way)… so as to be able to behold

There are moments in life that stick with you and perhaps forever will…. like when you realize that you are so empty (in a good way) of yourself and worldly cares that there is ample room for the beautiful Light to flood in, and for all that is Good and Holy to be able to be totally and completely beheld.

One of these moments has always stuck with me. I was at the water with my children… it was years ago, and the river water was cool and the sun was warm. I think it was June. They were looking for crawdads, clambering over the rocks on the shore (as we all do), so content and happy. (As they always are at the river!) They swam and splashed and basked in the summer sun. They had grown up here so this place was like their backyard.

I had been coming there for years. This place had held me through so much of life’s journeying: the young mothering, the adventures of the mind and the heart, and all those blessed, hard homeschooling/homemaking days when I was almost always pregnant or nursing, changing diapers and ever-juggling the household, education, and play of my four little ones under the age of seven. Amidst the everyday circus I would make the time to go to the river, to the woods and to the ocean. We loved to explore together and I’d pack the apples and bars and corn chips and cheese. And Field Books in hand, we’d explore the land around us from the mountains to the coast. 

Year after year I would sit there and think, and pray, and maybe take a phone call, but in general it had always been my place to just be. Through all the pains and the joys, the river was there, holding us. It never changes. The water that flows does, but the scene of the grasses and hedges and towering firs bordering it, and the sky overhead and the scent of the blackberry blossoms and the sun on the rocks… these were ever the same. The water flowing through a beautiful land while we people were changing and growing.

The moment that stood out to me was long after all those difficult yet adventurous years; it was after much change and many transitions in my life, maybe 6 years ago or so. It was a striking and different moment because, for the first time I felt that good kind of emptiness: not feeling burdened by anything but being able to be fully there. Just knowing all would be well and being able to be fully present. It was a moment of stillness, peace, and total freedom. In that moment my MIND was free; it was crystal clear.

I desire to continually be emptying in this way… so that I can fully behold and love and see. It is an art, this seeing, living and breathing thing. Somewhere in Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she says that seeing is an act of love.

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. -Annie Dillard

HOW WE LIVE, what we fill our days with, and every choice we make, is so important. It is in the little moments of choosing to be fully present that we change interiorly and are actively nurturing the Life within us.