This week’s post is late. I have been frozen it seems by incoming very terrible and incoming very wonderful news (one the entwined deaths of a couple I never knew, the other birth of a grand-niece). I feel like a snake after a huge meal, overwhelmed by what I have taken in, passive and digesting. I wonder if this is how Owen feels on a holiday weekend, with all the positive and the disruptive stimulus. But the holiday is over, and his mom is still blank, adrift on facebook, not getting supper on the table on time.
Bad news makes the presence of innocence more noticeable. Contrast intensifies our appreciation. Owee woozlings (when Owen lays his face on someone’s neck or shoulder) have increased value. Owen isn’t easy, but he is gentle and pretty sweet even when he is chewing up plastic tomato pots or cutting my cellphone charger cord in two.
Over Easter weekend a dear friend sent me a Wall Street Journal article that I share with you here. Please enjoy a peek into another world, captured here by Sohrab Ahmari, in his interview of Jean Vanier, a remarkable, gentle man, and founder of The Ferns (in Paris), and L’Arche movement worldwide.
“The men bought a trick mustard pot with a spring in the lid that would jump out when opened. ‘Raphael, he loved that,’ Mr. Vanier recalls. One day a state inspector visited the house, and Raphael ‘would push the mustard pot, inch it forward toward the inspector, and he finally opened it—and there was laughter! That was at the heart of everything…’ “
– Sohrab Ahmari, The Gift of Living With the Not Gifted. (Wallstreet Journal, April 3, 2015). http://on.wsj.com/1BYKdBb
Embracing Chaos 