How Was Your Summer?

An innocent enough question, looming with gloom and a cloud of anxiety, even disbelief, on the conversational horizon. What do I say of such a summer, in casual tone?

I left my profession of seminary teaching for a brief hiatus begun on June 4^th, ostensibly for a 5-day teaching in archetypal and cross cultural psychology held in Loveland, Colorado. I’m not sure all the reasons my husband and I spent the funds for me to participate in this event of professional development. Post-semester reprieve? Pursuit of work that had shaped much of the previous autumn’s scholarly endeavors? Opportunity cost paid up front, in case the teacher grew unable to teach in public again, with her advancing age? Regardless, I landed in Loveland a day early, to adjust to the altitude and to be shocked at the conference center entrance--a sign stating "The Emissaries of the Divine Light." Huh? Spending a week at a conference center that is also a commune had not been on my viewscreen. So, the first answer: my summer has been unexpected adventure into the Divine Light. J

The summer has blossomed a new business card in my professional work as well. Two separate occasions presented themselves to do some consulting about interreligious-multifaith matters on secular university campuses. On the first, I realized with some surprise that my gut refused to have any of my business cards on hand. A strange behavior, given I am a higher ed professional with both interest and skills in getting my work out into new environments, usually begun with a business card exchange. The second instance I had the new cards forefronting The Artisanal Way, fostering an expressive delight, one heart at a time. “Spirituality, practice, meaning and ethics; interreligious and multifaith learning.” The glossy front shows off the diversity of bread loaves that serve as background to the logistical information. So a second answer: my summer has birthed a new business card for understanding who I am, primarily as companion, scholar, teaching elder, and poet.

The bulk of the summer has been about listening anew for the gifts and graces to receive and offer in my life, my family, my community. I’d forgotten how difficult it is to listen first, and for a long while. To wait for the context and invitation to share that which I know, that which I have received, that which I am to offer. What does one do to show for one's efforts, communicating an active state of listening? Shading mandalas with colored pencils was one idea. Regular walks was another, with attention to the wildlife of the preserve--skunks, raccoons, stray cats and birds galore. Who am I without my work, without a project? I learned I have less idea than I originally thought. Higher education offers some prestige of academic achievement--a PhD suggests some tenacity within the life of the mind, or at least cognitive stubbornness, if nothing else. But it does not set the stage well to listen to embodied experience as theological method. One argument follows the next, all with attention to what literatures support or challenge the governing thesis. But what if one's best teaching comes through an embodied intuition, given shape in literature but originating in the flotsam-and-jetsam of messy human experience? This summer has begun to suggest that the kind of teaching for which I am most suited has less and less opportunity for expression where I currently serve and listen. Band-aids have been applied, and the year will tell what is able to be offered along the companionable way of theological formation. But these may or may not suffice for suitable opportunities over time.

The summer has blown open my imagination for what life might be, or become, for me and my beloved. In New Haven to present a paper while on location at a pinnacle of higher education, I hear it’s time to leave higher ed as I’ve known it. My voice but not my voice. Attentive to abdominal pains and the need to discover a “womb of one’s own,” I hear invitation to listen for forty weeks for what “a psychic representation of my reproductive body” might—could—be. Four weeks of abdominal massage therapy later, with an expressive willingness to live into a new path in the months and years to come, all abdominal discomfort disappears. Way opens for an introductory workshop into craniosacral therapy, then perhaps a 12-month mentorship while I listen for what kind of healer I might be, if I were one. And of course, while sitting at a shaded picnic table for my lunch hour, I share an hour of timeless, companionable space with an engineering professor from Alabama who's wrestling with what it might mean to be a Reike healer while immersed in higher education. Of course we would meet. My beloved insists on the massage table and saddle stool—signs of our mutual investment in a new path of bodywork and learning. “Exploring the incarnation in a non-traditional way,” shall I say? My summer has therefore been an invitation into learning new embodied ways of companionship through healing touch, as well as the obvious pursuits of mind and spirit in structured educational contexts.

On this last day of July, as I officially note the conclusion of my self-constructed monastery month, I am hearing that my summer has been one of much needed rest, a much needed reorientation toward discernment of gifts instead of institutional hungers, and many new (and much needed) practices for rooting my mind more deeply into my body amidst technological seductions and demands of professional achievement. What will re-entry be like, with intention to be a little less competent so that bodies may breathe and energies may become healthier? What will it require, to teach what I've learned, namely that we cannot accomplish nearly as much, nor as quickly, as our minds imagine? Such teaching would be unacceptable in some institutional locations, but not necessarily the one in which I currently serve. What to share, when one learns life is too short to hurry all the time? And how to proceed, when one has learned it's possible to open to the sensate awareness of Spirit and survive its wounding, known both in an expressive delight and a responsive demand?

How shall I respond, when I hear "How was your summer?" My summer was not remotely what I expected, but it was precisely what I needed, for Spirit's invitations to be heard and well considered. Or I suppose I could just say, "FanTABulous, thank you."