I loved to spin when I was a child. Around, and around, and around I'd twirl until that intoxicating dizziness over took me and I couldn't stand any longer, until I tumbled to the ground in a fit of breathless laughter. Growing up, our neighbor's yard was perfect for it: a large, level, grassy space that allowed several of us kids to claim our own space, stretch out our arms, and take flight. It's a memory so vivid that all I need to do is close my eyes and I'm back there, barefoot, soft grass beneath my feet, twirling, twirling, twirling in my own personal tilt-a-whirl. I can hear the other kids laughing. I can hear the dogs barking two houses down, mad that they can't come join in our fun. I can smell the freshness the summer grass, and I can hear the cars as they brake approaching the stop-light on the busy avenue a block over. I can feel the tickling of the blades of grass on my neck as I lay on the lawn, the world continuing to spin around me, watching the the wispy, summer clouds dance above me as if I were peering up into the bottom of a centrifuge, and I alone was the sole still object in a twirling, tumbling world. Sometimes we'd all join hands and play Ring-Around-the-Rosie, going faster and faster and faster until we couldn't get to the last line of the rhyme before tumbling down into a jumbled heap of knobby knees and grass-stained elbows. It was pure, innocent, untainted joy (historical meaning of the nursery rhyme aside, of course).
I sat down this evening to begin to detail more of the journey that brought us to this point of having to give up on this house. For some reason, though, that memory is so strongly on my mind. The memory of spinning, laughing, tumbling, and breathing in the evening summer air so deeply that I thought I'd burst, is now bursting out of me. Maybe it's the fact that summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest after an historically cold, wet spring, or that I spent the last week playing on the banks of the Wenatchee River, taking a much-needed break away with my family and doing my best to forget about the chaos and the sadness and the noise that has so dominated my life lately. I suppose I'm simply grasping for those sweet moments to immerse myself into.
Moments like last Saturday, on our last full day of our get-away. We were walking back to the condo, electing to take the river-front trail instead of the paved paths and sidewalks through town. We came across a sliver of a beach where the swift waters of the river slowed into a gentle, calm pool. The kids could not resist and within minutes had inched themselves into the water up to their waists, fully clothed. As I sat on a log and watched Jellybean give Miss Florida a lesson in the art of making the perfect mud ball (and I mean a lesson, as she declared it to be her classroom with Miss Florida as her student, and then proceeded for 30 minutes to give the best hands-on lecture I've ever experienced) I remembered for the first time in a long time what it was like to just "be." That feeling that, even though the world is spinning seemingly out of control around you, you can be perfectly still and untouched by the gyrating chaos.
Those are the moments when I can really see and feel and hear God. They are the moments that I have to retreat to when the spinning, earthly realities of circumstance and responsibility threaten to and often succeed in throwing me to the ground. It's in these moments, dizzily sprawled out on the grass or lazily sitting on the edge of a rushing river, that I remember that the point of our childhood spinning and Ring-Around-the-Rosie-ing is to fall down. We realize from a very young age - and begin to forget some point in adolescence - that we can't keep spinning forever, no matter how much fun it is at first, and we find joy and relief and such beauty in the falling and landing.
I've always been so afraid of failure and of tripping up, of falling, that I have a hard time stopping my twirling, or worse yet, even starting to spin in the first place. I've realized now that we've been spinning and spinning and spinning, long past when it was fun, or exciting, or healthy, and we need to fall down to have a chance to recognize the joy and relief of being still. Even more, just knowing that I'm finally falling, falling down, even if I haven't felt the sweet cradle of the summery lawn beneath me yet, brings it's own relief.
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