God is Generous With Us!

                                                        Pervasive obstacle: "Oh, this won't do."
                                                                Notice, and say another thing.
                                                   

                                       Divine Contemplation as experienced by the Quacks:

     Mom and I were noting the indescribable richness and abundance of reality and bemoaning the fact of our complete inability to capture, retain, describe or understand it.
      Mom: "We have to just throw in the towel. It's too much."
      Mom: "No, actually, just give it entirely to the Holy Spirit and tell Him it's not fair. Tell Him He has to guide us and make clear what we are to do, and if He doesn't, then *brandishes a threatening fist at the air* we've got a bone to pick."
      Mom: “So now we see that we really can’t go to heaven because it’s just not even enough to say that it would blow your socks off and fry all your circuits.”

And here's a little Gemma background from the last few years, before I describe a tiny bit of Quack life in Washington...

For me, making resolutions usually backfires. I become wrapped up in my intense effort to make something happen, to change something, to “be better”, and either I drop it, or I do it extremely well and am miserable, feeling as though there’s a policeman breathing down my neck all the time. So when I think of resolutions, I think of the purpose of them for me: to be a better person, to improve my life and feel happier, thus improving the lives of those around me and making them happier, to wake myself up to live and experience more fully and be more what I’m meant to be. The most fruitful resolution for me, then, is one that I have to remake all the time, and it’s no good to have too many so I like to stick with this one. I watch it develop and change faces different years, and see how it guides my life toward those purposes in a more organic way. It’s sort of a commitment to an attitude, which makes it hard to explain and also easy to forget, and a constant challenge to live.

I loved to bike from Cesena to Cesenatico and the Sea.

I went to Austria with my family three years ago, was dating long distance the whole time, broke up two weeks before coming back. So I moved in with brother and sister in law, it felt like the beginning of a dreary time marked by my first big job, first year really away from my little sisters and parents, no community, no friends, no plans, no desires, just a lot of sad and a lot of fear of missing everything good and having nothing. A lot of fruitful silence. Counseling. Slowly learning to believe in patience, to not lose heart just because I had no prospects or plans or ideas. To let myself not have a plan, to be open and to explore, to learn to take risks. I flew up to visit family in Washington in April, celebrated my 21 birthday with them, feeling the tension between relaxing with gratitude for what I have and the awareness that I couldn’t stay forever with my bother and sister in law in California. I spent my birthday learning to see it in a new way, as a day for me to consent to seeing my life as good, to consent to the blessings that surrounded me, to thank God for all the experiences I’d had and to trust again that a life full of gifts is not, in fact, evidence that they’re running out. As obvious as that may seem to many of you, it’s often very hard for me to believe, and becomes a daily struggle as I look behind me and see things I’ve loved that have passed on.

Flowers in Massa

I woke up the day after my birthday and saw an email that my Dad had sent from a woman in Italy, looking for an au pair to help teach her family English. She wanted someone for a month, in a month. I emailed her back that morning, and thus began the planning of a trip to Italy. So I spent the summer in Italy, working as an au pair and then on to three farms I knew next to nothing about. I found out about a program in which you can show up at farms all over the world and work for your stay, and I thought that sounded really neat, so I paid $40 and joined the Italian group. Before I knew it, I was taking an uber at 4am to LAX to fly to Italy “for the summer”. I have a thousand little and big stories I could tell about this summer. But mostly I felt like I was plunging into one completely unknown situation after another, from the moment when my friend who picked me up with a taxi at the airport in Bologna left the next day to fly back to the States and I found myself alone in an elevator, in a hotel in Bologna knowing not a soul south of Austria or East of LA, to getting off the train and walking up the stairs looking for two people who I’d never seen in my life to pick me up and take me “home,” to getting on a train to go to a farm where I’d only communicated with one person with a short email in Italian, and hoping I’d have a place to spend the night when I arrived... These were not easy situations for me to put myself in. No safe place to escape to, (although I did get to have my own room for the first time in my life...) I didn’t even know which farms I’d be going to when I arrived as an au pair. As the time came, I began contacting them and a week or two before it was time to go live there for two weeks, I received a response and headed out to the opposite Italian coast, again with my one back pack to see where I’d end up and who I’d meet and what I’d see.

Solo hike above the farm in Massa

.

Sunset from the garden in Assisi

    When I was in Assisi, and suffering from caffeine withdrawal (because they didn’t really believe in coffee) I found myself a little (or a lot) more reflective/broody than normal. I was on my hands and knees in shorts because it was so hot, but trying to kneel on a tarp because the dirt was hard from being baked in the sun and it poked into my knees. I used a pick and my hands to dig with all my might for purple potatoes. I’d lift up the heavy tool, and try to break the hard ground, but gently so as not to hit the delicate potatoes. Once I’d broken it a little I’d go at it with my hands, soil up to my elbows, piling it into my lap and fishing around underneath until I had searched thoroughly and figured I’d likely reached the bottom where they’d laid the seed in the soft dirt months before. The thing about harvesting potatoes is, you never really know when you’ve got the last one, or even nearly the last. Some mounds have one or two, some ten.

What a rich harvest!

The pick was bound to nick a few of them, and then those have to be eaten right away, so the idea is to soften the dirt and find the potatoes without breaking their skin. This was no easy task because the potatoes were obviously completely covered and hard to see until you touched one, since they were only slightly purple on the outside. What I noticed while doing this for several hours by myself in the garden, the sun beating down and not much noise, was the discomfort of having to continually decide when to cover up the spot I was working in and move to the next one. “That’s probably all the potatoes here.” But there was so much dirt it was very hard to tell. So, sometimes, if I’d only found a few, I would keep at it, fishing and digging, or even take the pick to the hard bottom where I thought nobody had dug into for years, and would find a layer of potatoes and realize there were more than I had thought. Once, I accidentally cut off a chunk of one of the potatoes while searching, and what I saw amazed me. Inside was the deepest, most beautiful color purple I’d ever seen. The water inside made it shine in the sunlight, and the color was deep, dark and bright. I paused to admire this lovely surprise for some time before continuing. Over and over again I’d be doing “just one last look” before I gave up on the mound and moved to the next when I’d find one of these precious, purple, disguised treasures, and I’d notice that my first experience was an “aha!” immediately followed by dismay. I realized this dismay came from an automatic, subconscious thought and attitude: “I found one when I didn’t expect it! I didn't plan to find that one, my hand just happened to touch it as it brushed that side of the hole, and I was about to cover it up again! How many others have I missed?”

From my perch on the wall of
St. Francis Basilica in Assisi

This was a difficult time for me, I was lonely and the family I was with didn’t do a lot of other things I was used to, and did a lot of things I didn’t. And it’s amazing how impossible it can be to be open to other people and challenges when all you want in the whole world is a nap. Anyway, some part of me was able to watch and learn, even as I was angry and frustrated at various people and things. Simon, the father of the family, a kind, childlike, completely aggravating man, was unique and admirable. He cared for his family, he educated his sons in real life, thought, art, practice, responsibility, he loved nature and each day woke up with gratitude.

Hard workers harvesting lavender!

He would pause his work putting nets over the apple trees so the birds didn’t eat them all (my job was mostly to stand there with my pole while he clambered all over fitting it together), to stop and marvel at a giant bumble bee in a flower by his feet, like it was the first time he’d ever seen such a thing. Another day, a similar bee landed on his lip while we were outside cutting lavender together, and when he touched it it gave him quite the sting and his lip blew up to at least twice it’s size. After a short break, some comments on how silly he probably looked and how he was glad it had been him and not me since I would have looked funny taking the train, he would go right back to his work, cheerfully marveling at all around him and still looking ridiculous. I was kneeling in the dirt again one day, harvesting more potatoes and wondering why I was so angry at everybody, and no doubt dealing with my continual feeling of inadequate potato digging whenever I found another one, when he walked by and said cheerfully and peacefully, “Look at that! We just move the dirt and there’s a potato! God is generous with us.”

Collected from the garden in Assisi

    It was a continual work, with continual fruit, to remember to assume that I and what I had were enough, and to step across each threshold and say “I’m your new farmhand!” To a small family or agritourism business, and see if they understood my English and had a room for me. And to expect that what came, what I found, would also be enough, and would also be beautiful. And again and again, like finding that purple potato! I was surprised and given things I never ever could have planned, and again and again I’d be afraid I wasn’t living it right, seeking hard enough, planning and being sure to get the full experience. But when I was able to relax that fear and look around and live as though I believed in the goodness and generosity of reality, I was amazed at what I found.

As I flew back to LA, after a truly wonderful last few weeks of being surprised day after day with the beauty of the people I met and places I was in and simple, peaceful tasks I was given to do, I thought of how many lovely things I had just lived when practically all I had done was buy a plane ticket and quit my job in LA, show up and look around. I remember flying out of Denmark after a layover, hot tea in my hand, a lovely picture of wheat blowing in a breeze on the cup and a comfortable window seat with a beautiful view. It was night and I saw the lights of the Copenhagen clearly while wisps of cloud floated above us and then eventually below us as we flew higher, and I saw the outline of the ocean surrounding the island where the lights gave way to huge patches of darkness.  I noticed that I had once again left beautiful people and places I’d fallen in love with, and yet was already being given another new, unique, and beautiful moment to be in. I was on my way to I didn’t know what, past arriving at my sister’s apartment in Pasadena. I resolved, once again, to believe the evidence given me, and to look to whatever came next back in my more familiar, yet still unplanned life, with eyes like Simon’s: ready to see how generous God is with me.