Here and Now

My Longings (and Yours too?) Offer a New Way to Wait

It’s a two-hour delay day; I don’t have to teach until noon.

Though I’m not one to jump up and down for the cold, these winter days are some of my favorites, but only if I can make it to rost coffee on Second Street.¹ Home away from home. Home when I don’t have a home of my own.

Today, like every day, I’m thinking about my life.

Because I’m reading Charles Dickens’s novella, A Christmas Carol, with my students, I’m thinking about what really matters. In what ways am I a Scrooge? In what ways can I let love thaw my insides?

One of my most significant faults is discontentment.

We’re house shopping, lightly. We won’t have enough funds until May, but we will have enough, it seems, to buy what we need. So I’m not so discontent with HOME as I have been.

With this longing settled for now, others crop up. Immediately. I am nothing without longing.

Where do these desires come from? What is beneath this surface?

Here at rost’s south-facing window, wintry light warming my flannel, melting the snow on the picnic tables, the snow on the fountain grass of the patio, I know I want wholeness and healing. Not just for myself, but for Earth and all her inhabitants.

Healing and wholeness.

That’s what I’m after. That’s what I’m about. Everything else funnels into this desire.

It seems I have to wait—hence the constant discontentment—for healing and wholeness to grow.

But grow they do.

Here and now. I am healing. I am becoming whole. And so are you. Here and now.

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Soon, I’ll look at these words—healing and wholeness—on their surface. And I’ll lift this cover just a little, to see what might be happening underneath their letters. Join me?

In the meantime, take care.

—CJS

1. The best coffee shop in the whole world. I haven’t tried them all, but I’ve tried enough to know you can’t do better than rost.