A friend called from the Miami airport. Her flight to Costa Rica had been delayed until the next morning. I could hear the disappointment in her voice. She’s tough. She can help ewes through complicated births, prune blueberries all day in windy, cold Vermont weather, and stay calm on the outside when her teenage daughter bikes across the continent. But this was a precious gift to herself, a week away to work on her book. A week in her own silence to ponder, percolate, and write, without all the distractions and demands of home and the farm. And now the week had been robbed of a day. Like watching a friend take too big a bite out of the cookie you offered just to taste, there was a real piece gone.
And now, with not enough time to justify a hotel, too much time to sit at the gate, restaurants closing, and the zombie hours at airports about to begin, she walked, outside. The warm tropical air must have been a nice reprieve from the bracing New England air of home, but a day was gone, and she would start her retreat tired. In these moments it takes a lot of will power to keep the bumpy things at bay.
And then! She called on the return, from the same airport, for the same reason. A delayed connection meant many more hours at the airport. We talked, and it had been a wonderful week. The ideas were important, the writing good, and the warm breezes and fresh fruits a delight. Damn, I thought. I knew it all too well. In the course of a day, with numerous lines, keeping track of your stuff, triple checking where your passport is, and finding food that is real, it feels like being on high alert, and all so unnatural. Precious experiences get pulverized by the beast of modern travel. I worried that all the good that had happened would get squashed. In that moment on the phone, I reached for a thought and offered it up.
When native peoples would move camp, embers from the fire were wrapped safely with moss and small pieces of wood, and depending on where you lived, sealed in a buffalo horn, shell, or clay pot, then brought to the next camp, and fanned to flame again. I proposed wrapping her precious week of good thoughts, warm ocean waves, the sound of tropical wind shaking palm fronds, and the new clarities of her book project—to wrap them up, protect them against the stress of TSA checkpoints, the onslaught of airport announcements, the rampant commercialization of stuff, and the feeling of swimming upstream in a river of humanity going the other way, and then, when home, on a perfect morning free of distractions, with a cup of really good tea, laced with a touch of local honey, to find the coziest place to sit, and pull out the carefully wrapped writings and notes from the week, her word embers still warm, and blow fire back into a very good week.
Your writing was so comforting to read, especially when I reached the last sentence, glad I read until the end. – "to find the coziest place to sit, and pull out the carefully wrapped writings and notes from the week, her word embers still warm, and blow fire back into a very good week"
This has given me thought about carrying my embers from morning to night