Yesterday evening I went out to the side yard to harvest a bit of rosemary to use while preparing dinner. The dinner wasn't for me, but for another family, a family who could use a dinner, and the process of cooking this dinner reminded me of how the preparing of food can be a gift of service, and the preparing and giving or sharing of food, is an act of communication, of sharing, and of building bonds, bonds that stretch far beyond the single meal.
But that is not the point of this post.
When I went out to the side yard, where the herb garden is located, I saw that the majority of the side flower bed has been colonized by masses of mushrooms, masses just like the one above, which was next to my rosemary bush. The whole scenario took me by surprise. Once I recovered from my shock, I thought the flower bed had a certain alien-landscape aspect to it, but I couldn't quite capture that on film in the early evening light.
Admittedly my first thought was "Oh no!". My second thought was more along the lines of "Eh, its winter. They aren't hurting anything." It has been warm and damp. It is now getting colder and we will have a hard freeze. It is possible the wood chip mulch the landscaper for my neighborhood used last spring is part of the problem. It burnt existing plants when they put it out, and not just in my yard, and I have had a constant fungus problem in the areas they mulched, but nowhere else. That may be a problem that needs to be addressed before spring growth begins, but in January, no.
But dealing with fungus is not really the point of this post either, although the appearance of the fungi may have indeed initiated my chain of thought, just as the fact that I was cooking dinner and needed rosemary initiated my trip to the garden.
Life throws us mushrooms when we are least expecting it. At times, unexpected setbacks proliferate like a field of fungus. At other times, life seems to be running smoothly and we once again assume that we are in control, and if we can only stay the course and do the right thing, good things will roll before us like a never ending yellow brick road. It is all an illusion. We spend the first half of our lives building structures, defining ourselves in the world, deciding who we are going to be and the role we will fill in our societies and our social structure. We battle the mushrooms, uprooting, scraping away that which we see as unnecessary, applying fungicide, building newer (hopefully stronger) structures. This is all very necessary. It is all a part of our humanity, of what allows us to function in the world. But it is not necessarily all that there is to us.
At some point we may realize that there is in fact, very little we can control in our lives. We've built this external structure that allows us to function, but only within our illusions. We can keep fighting the mushrooms to the very end. Or we can pick our battles, and accept that life is in fact random, and out of control, and like the dark woods in fairy tales, full of dangers. But fairy tales are not useless frightening imaginings meant to scare children. They are maps that show us how to be resilient. First we must build our house, and then once the house is built, we must rediscover our character, and make our house a sanctuary that keeps us strong and warm in the face of the cold winds. The question is do we build a house of straw, or a house of stone? Each of us has that choice, and we often don't know what we are building until the foundation has already been poured. But the good news is that we can, if we choose, fortify whatever we have built, can help ourselves to become more resilient, more generous, stronger, and more flexible in the face of the random ravages of the world. Do we close ourselves off, behind walls of steel, or do we learn that our strength is inside us, and stand tall, bending in the wind and not breaking?
Here it is early January, and there has been a lot of talk of resolutions and goals. Do we make them? Do we stick to them? Are they broad or narrow, large or small? Does it even matter what my goals are? What if my goal is to be truly kind to everyone I meet, to treat them as I would truly like to be treated, to attempt to live up to "love thy neighbor as thyself" (or at least as thou would like to be loved)? A group of us had this discussion the other night. And it was said, although there may have been some misunderstanding of intentions here, that the goal of loving thy neighbor is not enough, that you need a corporate structure, and some shied away from this, myself included. But I have come back to it because I think both are true.
I honestly believe that if each of us could try to be kind, the ripples would be never ending. But I also believe in structures and know that each and every one of us needs some kind of structure in our life that allows us to function, allows us to strive toward our goals, and allows us to bend and change when we either achieve our goals, or see that our goals need to change and evolve. To have a goal is not enough. When my grandson entered kindergarten, his goal was to grow up to own a Lamborghini dealership. A pretty grand goal for a small child. But the point is not whether your goal is grand, or small. Or even whether or not you achieve the goal. The point is the character you build in the process, and the structures you build. Do you build structures that help you reach your goals? When you get there, have you become the person you wanted to be? Are you becoming the person you are meant to be?
Without resilience, without structure to help you build resilience, you cannot work toward your goals. Increasingly, I think the structures we impose to frame our lives are more important perhaps than the goals themselves. The goal alone is not enough; it cannot be accompanied without the structure. If along the path the goal evolves, the structure still supports us. And I we falter, and we always falter, the structure we have built allows us to pick ourselves up and keep moving forward. What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning? What work do you do that fills your soul? Who do you help? Why? If your goal is to love your neighbor, what do you do when your neighbor screams at you in the middle of the night? How do you fortify yourself when you are tired and have a cold and just want to go home and have a cup of tea or brandy and go to bed but traffic is terrible and you feel like everyone else on the road is an idiot? Is your structure fragile? Does it crumble easily? Is your structure so heavily fortified that you have lost yourself inside its forbidding walls? Or is your structure just right? Holding you up and yet also flexing through the force of the gale?
You have to find your own structures, your own paths to wisdom and grace. Structures that allow you to be open and to bend but still remain strong, structures that allow you to laugh at mushrooms, and death, and screaming neighbors. Yes those things give us pause, yes they sometimes even terrify us, but what keeps them from defeating us?
We all search for meaning. We all yearn for Grace, no matter what we may call it. And we all battle lethargy, and darkness, and failure, and the fear of death, the fear of not leaving our mark, the fear of not being enough. We all battle evil, but the world itself is not evil. The mushrooms and the storms and the plagues of locusts are not evil. We define evil, and we allow it to fester, or we can build structures to root it out, out of ourselves, out of the world.
Build structures. Build strength. Build resilience. Find your own sweet spot. Find grace. You will not need to search for goals. They will find you, and you will find your path. The sun always rises. Let the line shine through the clouds in your heart.