A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (16 page)

How could anyone possibly decline such a magnificent act of generosity? We sent her a check immediately, she rented the house, and she began assembling volunteers to help care for the women; others to watch their children when they needed to work; and still others to bring food and other supplies to the shelter. She enlisted men to help clean, remodel, and furnish the new facility. Within six months, Henrietta had five to seven women and children staying at the shelter at any given time, and had recruited dozens of volunteer caretakers, cooks, and childcare volunteers. She had about twenty more men and women helping with cleanup, repair, and all the endless chores required to provide a safe and welcoming space for those frightened and hurt, and in need of comfort, nourishment, and sanctuary.

How does the story end? Like all human stories, with a mixture of joy and sorrow. Three years after opening, Henrietta died of cancer—a tumor in the brain. Like so many on public welfare without insurance, without access to care, and in spite of everyone’s efforts to help, Henrietta passed on, beloved by so many.

The shelter, however, survived. Not only did it survive—it grew and thrived. In the past thirteen years since Henrietta first called me that afternoon, the home in Española has grown and grown, and now, as a fully staffed crisis center, has permanent facilities in three regions of northern New Mexico and serves hundreds of women, men, and children, offering counseling, shelter, legal services, women’s and men’s groups, educational outreach, and a twenty-four-hour crisis line.

Our initial investment of only $3,600 has liberated the natural generosity of so many, blossoming with hundreds of
volunteers offering thousands of hours of service monthly, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fiscal and in-kind donations, and a tangible sense of safety and well-being for women and their families in need throughout northern New Mexico. This, we have learned, is how, when loved and tended well, living things begin to grow into
enough
.

The Seduction of Artificial Emergency

O
urs is a crisis-driven world. We are bombarded by a cacophony of people, images, crises near and far, reports of powerful or famous people, compelling political and social arguments projected in shrill, combative tones, insisting that we should be acutely aware of the success or failure of this law, that film, this celebrity marriage, insisting that this scientific discovery or stock quote may be the single factor that determines the fate of the universe as we know it. Every commercial, political opinion, or entertainment item is reported in the same deadly serious manner: Listen! Pay Attention! You absolutely need to know what I am about to tell you. All life hangs in the balance!

While this may seem a bit overstated, there remains an escalating assault of media intrusions, communications and invitations, political causes and desperate pleas for our attention. Everyone screams louder and louder to be heard above the noise of so many competing voices. How can we feel that our own voice will ever be heard? How, as one person, can we ever feel we truly matter? How do we measure the impact of our work, our time, our life, against so many crucial events of the day? How can we ever feel like more than a consumer, a tiny cog in an enormous wheel, a barely visible blip on some gigantic screen?

We all hope that who we are, what we do, and the things we offer will in some way be seen and recognized as valuable to our family, our workplace, and our community.

But how do we rise above the fray and make certain our voices will be heard above the din of everyone else’s strident pleas for attention? Some people make elaborate strategic plans to acquire status or power; others try to achieve great things and hope for the recognition to follow; a few simply do their best at what they love and pray it seeds a good harvest in the family of the earth.

As the world grows louder, larger, and more complicated, our immediate usefulness can be more difficult to see. One way out of this dilemma is to be the one who saves the day, who takes charge, puts out the fire, saves the life, successfully defuses the swiftly ticking, escalating, explosive emergency. Then we will surely be seen, honored, and, at long last, recognized for our invaluable contribution to the world.

As we feel more powerless and voiceless in a crisis-driven world, we may come to depend on, even look forward to, the value we acquire when called upon to solve anything that appears as a big, dangerous problem. It becomes easy for us to inflate ordinary, everyday confusions into desperate situations—especially if we are the only one capable of solving this terrible crisis.

With a few exceptions, such as sudden oxygen deprivation, heart stoppage, excessive blood loss, or some rare opportunity to prevent violence or war with a single, perfectly timed intervention, nearly every other “emergency” or “deadline” in our life is essentially arbitrary. The truth is, if a child is literally on your doorstep, bleeding out right in front of you, and you
are a doctor or can carry the child to the hospital on the next block, that is an emergency. If you are in charge of a report or newsletter and it is already 3 p.m. and it was supposed to be at the printer by 2 p.m.—that is
not
an emergency.

The point is this. Can we, when we feel compelled to respond to some escalating crisis at home or, at work, undertake a simple practice to stop, step back from the details of the moment, take a few quiet breaths, and listen carefully for the real consequences of this situation, however potentially dire or benign, however real or imagined, before we reactively charge in, guns blazing, ready to save the day, to preserve life as we know it?

When we are in crisis, we can make very swift but often incomplete or inaccurate choices that may unintentionally seed yet other crises in the future. Most good choices require time, mindful reflection and deep listening, and the attention to hear what is the next, absolutely right and good thing to do.

If we live our days watchful and vigilant, a bit on edge, always awaiting and anticipating some imagined, impending emergency, our entire muscular and nervous system is on full alert all the time. This relentless preoccupation with what could happen next evokes a fight-or-flight posture that can never completely relax. It taxes our energy, our resilience, and our ability to attend gently and well to whatever is actually happening in this moment. It becomes harder to sleep, to relax, and to be deeply content or at peace with things just as they are.

How can we ever fully appreciate or enjoy a nice cup of tea, or an unhurried moment of ease during our walk from the car into work, with all our systems constantly on high alert for every potential emergency?

The Tyranny of Access

M
any of us presume a certain right to privacy. If we are in our homes, our places of business, on vacation, in our car, we assume we should feel relatively safe from intrusion. Our deep constitutional presumption that we should be safe in our homes and bodies helps make us feel secure, able to go about our lives freely, with less fear and anxiety. The safer we feel, the more spontaneous, creative, playful, and joyous our lives can become. Constant fear of intrusion can inhibit these same impulses, corrode our imaginations, and choke our ability to play, to dream, to fly.

Of late, through the expansion of ever more connective technologies, we find ourselves suddenly aware of an essential cultural shift, one that presumes less and less a right to privacy and more and more a right to access. With the advancing tsunami of ubiquitous communication—from email to cell phones, websites to pagers, fax machines to text messages, webcams, and emerging social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter—everyone seems to feel they should be able to find us whenever they want. If they want to contact us, or know where we are, or talk to us, meet with us, make a request, even demand a response, there are fewer places to hide and
hardly any acceptable excuses for denying anyone, anywhere, anytime, virtually unlimited access to our lives.

There are few real, authentic emergencies that require our immediate, life-saving response. So why is this important? Because more and more people presume unlimited access to our lives, our homes, our time. Those who want something from us expect us to give it to them. They assume that if they have all our possible contact information, we should respond.

My friend Herb works for a large federal agency. He told me that someone in the finance department had sent him an email as Herb was leaving for a lunch meeting. This was clearly not a crisis, only an interdepartmental form that needed a signature. He decided to respond after lunch.

When he returned thirty minutes later and opened his email, he found (among several others) seven emails that had arrived from the financial department. Each demanded, with increasing severity, impatience, and anger, that Herb respond
immediately
to his request. It had after all already taken a full half-hour, and yet was still ignored. Exactly
who
(the infuriated finance officer demanded to know) does Herb think he is?

What, you may ask, does this have to do with our journey toward a life of enough? If our time, our privacy, our choice to create our own schedule is neither a right nor even a privilege, soon our own lives are none of our business but rather are the business of anyone who has access to us. If we are no longer in control of our own lives and are instead subject to the whims and demands of others, how can we not gradually, instinctively, even unintentionally constrict in worry and fear? How can we ever feel the spacious freedom to dream, create, allow our unfettered hearts and minds to germinate without
fear of interruption? Tender seedlings of life, any life, require some cocoon, some greenhouse, some womb of uninterruptable protection to grow well. With the incessant threat of intrusion into our lives, we may never feel safe enough or quiet enough to hear those still, small voices that speak to us of the depth and breadth of who we are, what we have, and who we might become.

We are constantly on edge, alert to the possibility of interruptions, intrusions, and demands that can come for us at any time, for any reason. Where can we possibly find an impenetrable sanctuary of stillness to which we can retreat, in order to hear, to feel, in the marrow of our bones, the richness of our life this day, this moment, just as it is? Perhaps this is why, more than two centuries ago, several wise elders lifted up our right to privacy as one of the more sacred constitutional requirements for guarding and protecting our life, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness.

Boundaries: Fencing In Our Garden

I
n the yard behind my home in Santa Fe, there is a rich diversity of life forms that share a small plot of high-desert soil. There are fruit trees, hollyhocks, lilies, daffodils, irises, and poppies, each coming up in its own time and place. There is tarragon, cilantro, rosemary, and sage; there is lilac, aspen and golden locust. I planted each one, new things each year, depending on which color or fragrance seemed to call for balance. Without any effort of mine came magpies, crows, and blue jays; rattlesnakes, bull snakes, centipedes and tarantulas; lizards, hummingbirds, and, of course, the gophers, gophers that tunnel everywhere and eat everything. They particularly loved the roots of fruit trees. I had one peach tree that, after eight years of attentive watering, fertilizing, and pruning, was several feet shorter than when I planted it.

And then there were the tulips. I recall my astonishment when, as a native New Yorker and novice gardener, I first learned the miracle of perennials. Imagine putting a bulb in the ground one year and having the flowers come back faithfully, year after year, without ever having to plant them again! It instantly deepened my respect and admiration for the immeasurable cleverness of the Creator.

Armed with this revelation, I pored through bulb catalogues and ordered a colorful mixture, which I planted, in the fall, around the bird bath and in a small patch in front of the house. All winter I waited, looking forward to the sea of tulips that would arrive in the spring, just like the picture of the lush English garden in the Smith and Hawken catalogue.

Sure enough, in April, a beautiful pattern of green pointed leaves peeked out through the cold ground. Just two days later, they were all gone, eaten down to stubs, each and every one. I was crushed. The next two years the same thing happened. The bulbs managed to push up about an inch of leaves, and then they would disappear back into the ground.

I soon discovered a critical factor in the growth and cultivation of perennials that was not mentioned in the Smith and Hawken catalogue: jackrabbits. Jackrabbits abound here in the high-desert southwest, and for the first three years I accepted their eating the tulips as my gift to them; all beings were getting some benefit from our garden, I told myself. Then I decided to build a fence.

The people at our local nursery told me that a small, eight-inch-high fence around the tulips would be enough to discourage the jackrabbits. Even though they could easily jump over it if they tried, it would be enough to deter their curiosity. They would simply eat the abundant grasses and weeds instead.

The following year, I saw for the first time the reds and purples I had only imagined. The fence was a simple prohibition against harmful activity. As soon as the harmful activity was prevented, something in the ground, waiting patiently to be born, could grow.

Sometimes it is necessary to stop one thing before another thing can begin. We are often reluctant to set boundaries on our time, our attention, or our company, or to restrict full and easy access to us in any way, lest we seem aloof, unkind, or unhelpful. We also question the place from which our authority to set such boundaries comes from. Who are we to decide if we can limit what anyone else can do or not do, why should we be allowed to restrict their freedom, their desires, just because they bother us? What if our restrictions bother them?

Kelly Wendorf has been a horse trainer and riding teacher for much of her life. When my daughter Sherah was much younger, Kelly was her riding instructor. She wrote me recently wanting to share some of the challenges and lessons she was gleaning from working with horses, using a more subtle, mindful practice: