family | Michael Valliant

Making Moments

The world is rough. It is full of death, sickness, sadness, and anger. The adage is that life is suffering. You can’t dispute that. There is so much we can’t understand, that doesn’t make sense to us. Granted we can’t see the big picture, but there are times when our limited view can seem absurd.

But then there are moments. Moments when our hearts expand, connect to our minds, guide our actions, and we can see and feel something bigger than ourselves. Life is also full of these moments, but it is up to us to see them. To find them. And to help make them, for ourselves and for others. Especially for others, because that is how we experience them for ourselves.

Spirituality is not learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there. – Meister Eckhart

In his sermon yesterday, Father Bill Ortt described a mystic as “someone who is hypersensitive to God around them.” He talked about Meister Eckhart, who is a favorite of mine. I think we do well to have people around us who are hypersensitive to God’s presence in the world and in our hearts. They help us to see, they help us to not miss our moments.

For me those moments can happen anywhere. They happen watching my daughters play field hockey. They happen in an interview that turns into a two-hour conversation on spirituality and life. They happen sitting with Anna, Ava, and a friend of theirs at Rise Up Coffee, eating and laughing and telling stories. They happen catching a sunset on the water. I felt a transcendent moment in church yesterday as the choir and congregation were singing, clapping hands, and the girls started clapping along.

Experiencing those moments can be about being plugged in. If we close our eyes, we won’t see them.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one, one seeing, one knowing, one love. – Meister Eckhart

Yesterday afternoon was beautiful. As fall settles in, you don’t know how many of those weekend days we will have. So Ava and I opted out of watching football or TV, grabbed Harper and went hiking around Pickering Creek Audubon Center.

One part of experiencing those moments, is that sometimes you have to go make them. Our conversations, watching Harper cover ground, being in the woods and fields, smelling fall smells; it just as easily could have not happened.

Frederick Buechner wrote a book called, “The Alphabet of Grace,” where he tries to captures all the blessings and moments he experiences in a single day, just by looking more deeply into life.

Today, my moments and blessings are grateful ones: Ava having a good neurology appointment and good news on her MRI results; time spent with the girls and watching Anna discern and decide how/whether to spend money she earned babysitting; having a job I enjoy and that allows me to take time to go to a doctor’s appointment; coming home to a roof over our heads and a dog eager to share the evening; grilling dinner for the girls on a crisp, autumn night; taking time to be deeply and humbly grateful for the time we have together.

Storing Up, Finding My Way

I knew it was coming. Sometimes catharsis taps you on the shoulder, sometimes you run square into it, head on. Sunday we were waiting for each other.

My runs this summer have been five to seven miles, at a quick-for-me pace. It’s felt good to push and see how I respond. Sunday morning was the first group run I had done in a while. We started out slower, so I decided to run further. It was hot. I wasn’t planning to run so far, but the reckoning was there. I ran for about eight miles with someone faster than me, until I decided to drop off.

I found my quiet spot. My longest run of the year, at a pace too fast, undertrained, on a heat advisory day. I had reached a point where I knew I needed to draw spiritual blood; to push, to suffer; to get everything out; to find that place on the other side of daily life, on the other side of sweat and tired, that only running can take me.

In that place, I found a me I had let go for a bit. We stared each other down, smiled, and then got inside out of the heat. I am a glutton, not dumb.

Herb Elliott is responsible for one of my favorite quotes. I have written it in notebooks, posted it on the fridge, put it on bulletin boards. Sometimes I have to go back to it. I don’t think a race has to be a race, it can be life.

It’s time to store up. I’ve been antsy for a road trip, but this isn’t the same thing. It’s a gathering in; a collecting.

The hut at the top of the page is called Fossickers Hut, in New Zealand, I found via Cabin Porn. I don’t need to go there (though I wouldn’t argue), but need to find/make that space. To feel it, so that I remember the me that running brings me back to; that writing brings me back to. Sometimes I don’t realize I’ve stepped away, then look around. And have to find my way.

It was a long day, of early morning field hockey practice and watching Anna tough out a 7am practice when feeling like crap the whole previous day, and working through it. And being impressed by her fortitude. It was scrambling home after a late meeting, grilling dinner, and laughing with the girls over mindless dinner humor. It was walking outside after cleaning the kitchen, seeing the sun setting, and color and clouds, and reading the clouds differently.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher a storm, but to add color to my sunset sky. – Rabindranath Tagore, “Stray Birds”

Clouds add depth and shape. They shade us from the sun. They add color to sunsets and sunrises.

To Sit With a Dog

I lived with pets for the first 42 years of my life. I was preceded in my family by a grouchy, black cocker spaniel mix and a large Siamese cat. Dogs and cats were a part of life until separating in 2014, and rental agreements prohibiting pets.

Truth be told, at first I liked the quiet. And the clean. And not having to worry or be responsible for a pet. Daughters were enough. I was burned out.

But a funny thing happened in a quiet home. Quiet became silence. Silence became stillness. And home wasn’t home. There was a void. And the girls saw what it was before I did. They started asking to get a dog. As kids do. But I felt it. I am dense, but at some point it sank in. And our landlord agreed to allow a small dog.

We knew we wanted to rescue a dog, knew a bit what we were looking for, and through Operation Paws for Homes in northern Virginia, found Harper (named for Anna’s favorite athlete Bryce Harper and for author Harper Lee).

From someone who takes a philosophical approach to life, dogs teach us more about life and about ourselves than we ever teach them.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil, or jealousy, or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace. – Milan Kundera

When I walk Harper through town, just the two of us, something different happens to my mind. I am slowed from running, not in a hurry, and watching what she sees. Hopefully not a squirrel.

I need more “mindful” and less “mind full” in my life. And dogs can help get us there. Harper helps me get there.

Harper was found on the streets. She is skittish around big machinery; you can see some of what she’s been through. But at eight months old, she is one of the most chilled out puppies I’ve seen. And she puts smiles on the girls’ faces and laughter in their hearts in a way I haven’t seen in my house over the past two years.

Most everyone in our neighborhood knows Harper and speaks to her by name when they walk by and she’s in the yard.

She sleeps in the bed, against the back of my legs. On nights the girls are here, she often rotates sleeping with one of them. As I write, she is crashed out on her dog bed in the sun room. She is constant, consistent, boundless, loving unconditionally. Except maybe food and walks, those might be her terms.

There are days when I come home from work, and Anna or Ava will tell me that they took Harper for a walk around the neighborhood, and detail their route and what they saw. This has quickly become one of my favorite things.

I understand Jim Harrison when he says:

Barring love I’ll take my life in large doses alone–rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

In our case, Harper has added something to our family that we couldn’t have found any other way.