Cut, cut, cut...

April 30, 2015

I am spending the day hacking away at stem and sticker in the landscaping equivalent of a forest behind my house.  Our backyard is the gift that keeps on giving, but I grow more fond of it with every moment of toil I invest.  I note progress and I smell lilacs blooming and I see more beauty than monstrosity.  As my sanctuary is the sun, my pew is the green or dirt or weed or flower lending itself to my worship.  Today I labor under a cloudless sky surrounding me with that infinite blue.  It’s the color of my heaven’s sky…if I get to pick.  The warmth I crave is here, too, accompanied by a little Missouri spring breeze reminding me that tomorrow it could be 40 degrees if it wants to be.  Big tease.  

As I hack away at the fussy shrubs in my path, I have classical music floating through the air.  It’s almost nauseating, isn’t it, this little Ozarkian scene plucked straight from the pages of an E.M. Forster novel?  But I’m home alone and I’m the only one around here willing to tolerate my strings and piano nuggets that secretly comprise much of the soundtrack of my life.  As a zealous student I studied for hours with voiceless songs in my ears, protecting the concentration I so craved.  I walked down the aisle to Elgar’s Enigma Variations IX not because it sounded at all matrimonial, but because it just got to me.  It may have sounded more like a funeral dirge, but there is a surge just toward the end that stirs up hope. As I listen to it now, I cling to that swell of the strings.  I clung then, too.   You never know, of course, when melodies may take a turn.  That is life with hope in the notes.

So I clip away surrounded by (some may say) pretentious tunes beneath and in God’s creation which lacks all pretense.  When I work with my hands or what manual strength I have, my head is usually spinning.  Memories or worries or daydreams all amp up as I work.  Among these things, today I’m reminded how I alternated between liking and resenting such work as a child.  My brother and I were schooled in the art of yard work.  No shrub was safe on my father’s radar, and we were the minions aiding in their destruction.  I liked the work…I’ve always liked work.  I liked being together, doing the work. I liked proving that I wasn’t too young, too small, too afraid, or too female to mow the steepest hill or wield the sharpest clipper. But I hated that I had no choice.  When and where we worked lacked warning:  when it was time to go, go.  And don’t complain.  And be happy about it.  That’s fine to a point.  But when it’s not fine, it’s really not.

Choice, my therapist would say, means a great deal to me.  We tend to value that which is rare. Whacking the hell out of these limbs today is a choice.  So is the music.  And stopping to write this.  What a difference choice makes.  

A uniquely strong friend of mine told me once that it felt as if his life was not his own.  Too much was decided for him by those he loved, by duty, by the past.  As a child, I promised myself I would always get to decide things when I grew up.  It is largely a broken promise to that hopeful little girl.  How much of life should be our own?  How much should we give away?  How much is the happiness of others our responsibility, especially when the currency exchanged is our own happiness?  I don’t know.  If I did know, I think I might have one of the keys to the proverbial kingdom.  Even the Bible doesn’t give us a clear blueprint for the choices we have and the choices we forfeit.  

All this from a heap of cut limbs and more waiting to be sacrificed.  They have no choice and I doubt they are stewing about it.  Lucky them…?