Tag Archives: Waiting

Soul & Solace — September 2020

Creativity/Spirituality, , , ,

The Waiting Room

A houseplant, given by a child from last year’s camp, graces our kitchen table. This year, camp was online for the few who could attend, and while we were delighted to see our campers and their creations, it’s just not the same. We miss the folks we once chatted with, hugged, and created alongside. We wonder about the future. What will happen to them? What will happen to us?
 
We aren’t alone in our wonderings. We’re all hanging out in a global waiting room where, due to the virus, they’ve even removed the outdated magazines. We try not to breathe too deeply as we wait for our name to be called. We perch on uncomfortable chairs, wondering: What will the prognosis be? Will our business, our job, our marriage, our lives survive? Will there ever be a day when we can, again, breathe deep and free? What will our globe look like once the waiting room empties and it’s all over?
 
One of the hardest things we do as humans is to wait. And, oddly, that hard thing can remind us of our mutual connection. Past months have brought plenty to yank us apart. Could the global waiting room draw us together? Might we look at one another over our masks and nod, “Yeah. Me, too?”
 
After last year’s camp, I dutifully watered our plant gift. Even so, the brilliant, waxy red blossoms withered and died. Autumn came, and then winter. Then March with its ill news followed by months of more bad news. But today I look across this screen at two brilliant, waxy red blossoms worth waiting for.
 
And I hope…
 
How do you pass the time in the global waiting room? What gives you hope? Share your Soul & Solace thoughts with us at contact@aspaciousplace.com.

October Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , ,

I read and hear a great deal about keeping up spiritual practice in our hectic lives. These past few months, however, another question has intrigued me: what spiritual practices help us wait? Waiting requires intense endurance, especially in a society addicted to busyness. Do any of the following “waiting places” resonate with your experience?

Having emailed countless job applications, you now sit at the computer, awaiting a response from some potential employer somewhere. Having stamped and mailed your “reach school” application, you visit the mailbox each day to discover whether or not they find you worthy. Your medical tests sit in a lab somewhere while you wonder whether or not you can bear what they may disclose. You are mending from an illness or injury; you wonder when life will get back to “normal.” You took a risk in a relationship and now wait, wondering how—or if—the other person will respond.

Waiting season have a timeless quality to them: we itch to DO SOMETHING when the something we are called to do is well . . . wait. Waiting is a marathon we do not run; waiting is an endurance marathon.

I hope some of the practices will supply stamina power for your waiting season.

  • Go deep. Waiting provides us space for reflection. Consider the following books as reflection aids: The Artists Way and The Vein of Gold by Julia Cameron, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Edward and Tarcher.
  • Play. If you have ever wanted to mess around with clay or write a limerick or take a walk to nowhere in particular, now is the time!
  • Serve. Waiting can leave us feeling powerless. Yet we always have the power to do the world good. Write someone a letter of encouragement . . . look the cashier in the eye and say “thanks” . . . bake a loaf of bread and give it away.
  • Find a metaphor. It helps me to imagine waiting as the transition phase of birth labor. Because I am in transition, I feel nothing but pain, yet I know that labor ends in birth. Imaging waiting as transition helps me hope—and hope helps me endure.