Flung Gold

I’ve tasted dissolution in prayer, that rare release from preoccupation into a clear bright field, and so longing for this union pulses under every moment, as Gwyn has lost yet another precious Barbie shoe and my patience fails, as over the years I watch our home’s windows film over with filth, as Emily and I hash out who will get the car when. I’ve known unity, however briefly, and once you’ve known it who wouldn’t want to escape this mess? So I go on retreat. A room of people also eager for silence surround me. The leader rings the prayer bell. Sound resonates on my skin. I breathe. I release my thoughts for a fraction of a second, and then the tornado of my daily chaotic overwhelming concerns rushes back, spins me off until I might well have just stayed at home for all the good prayer does me.

Two days of this. Practice matters, the retreat director assured us. The point was to bring a full heart to every moment. So on the third afternoon he invited us to do ordinary tasks around the center—dusting, vacuuming, washing windows, working in the garden—to practice presence. Completion wasn’t as important as attention. The irony of having paid good money to retreat from such chores was not lost on me.

It was March, glorious after too long a winter, so I chose the garden. A berm had been planted with ajuga before all the sod had been killed off, resulting in a mess of root-bound flowers and grass. Our job was to evict the grass.

I got to my knees and quickly realized the job was Sisyphusian. The berm was fifty feet long and twelve feet wide; the only reasonable solutions were to smother it with a black tarp and start over, or rototill, get rid of the sod, and replant the ajuga. Pulling grass by hand was untenable. If the retreat center was serious about wanting a garden, all our work would be undone.

But, I reminded myself, the point of this exercise was not accomplishment. So I shoveled out a two-by-two-foot patch and separated the small purple-leafed plants from tangles of grass roots; I gathered the sod in my bucket and replanted the flowers. My neck was warm, the soil was just waking up, and my mind for the first time all weekend cleared beautifully. On my knees I became soil and roots and sun. Perhaps I’d been looking for just this: complete presence, my attention no longer yanked by Gwyn’s demands or Emily’s sensory sensitivities or tasks that really do need to be done like getting meals on the table, but rather full and singular and absorbed. Within every instant there’s a place of bright surrender and I’d found it. Here was the black Midwestern soil. Here were abundant, threaded roots. Here was the thud of grass landing in the plastic bucket, my in-breath and out, and the rustling of other gardeners.

Who were giving up. The women asked for different jobs, the men decided to edge the garden with large rocks, allowing them to heave and haul and sweat and see results. Only I was left on the berm, surrendered to the assignment and the blossoming of time.

An hour passed, then two. I stood, removed my gloves, and ate a banana. I went inside to pee. When I returned, eager to reenter that blissful absorption, I realized my wedding ring was gone. Gone! My finger bare, and for how long? I raked my fingers through the dirt, I scoured the berm, but the ring was gone along with my inner quiet and smug self-satisfaction for having made the meditation work. Divine union suddenly seemed stupid.

I just wanted my ring, and I wanted all these meditators who couldn’t focus on the assignment anyhow to help me find it, damn it, because that ring represented my very human union with Emily which was already rich and reliable and which I’d been ignoring on this retreat for the sake of my relentless spiritual greed. When the group gathered again for our afternoon session I tried to focus but I just wanted my ring, so I retraced the steps of my earlier walk through the woods, scanning the packed leaves and muddy tracks but seeing nothing, not the budding trees nor the spring sun nor my ring. I was a hound. I could think of nothing else. My body vibrated with distress.

Emily and I had exchanged our bands at a gathering of friends and family from every corner of the country on a day so joyful we’d littered the floor with spent kleenex. Our rings were hand-crafted by a local artist who was no longer in business—thin gold streams in eternal circles because our love is like water, a source of life. For ten years our rings had absorbed affection and joy and marital effort. My connection with Emily is so tremendous I feel my heart sometimes shy away from it, like it’s too bright or like it’s God passing through and I’d better turn my back or get burned, and somehow the enormity of the love I know is there but can’t always feel was poured in gold into that small band which I toyed with constantly, as though it held what I could not.

Emily, I knew, felt the same way. Two summers earlier her ring slipped from her finger in the shallows of Lake Nokomis. She and Gwyn immediately dug in the sand and then recruited a dozen kids to troll the area, to no avail. After dinner she rented a metal detector and we returned to the beach. Gwyn was four and still hesitant to put her face under water, but got braver as the evening wore on and over three hours in the lake the following morning. Today we credit that time of fruitless searching for teaching her how to swim.

So Emily knew this sinking irresponsible feeling, this vague sense of having betrayed our vows, this desperate seeking. When she returned the metal detector, the guy behind the desk asked if she wanted the name of a treasure hunter. A buddy of his was retired; he trolled Nokomis for jewelry and had found over 160 rings. Emily called. Sure, he’d look. Two days later he phoned. He’d found it right where she’d lost it. No, he wouldn’t take payment. He was always happy to reunite a ring with its owner. In that moment, at least, all of us knew that the world was trustworthy—that the waters would hold everything we loved.

The sun was about to dip below the tree-line when the retreat session ended and a few people offered to help me look. Combing the grounds once more, I saw a glint of gold at the top of the berm. My relief was immense. The ring must have flung off when I’d removed my gardening gloves.

I still can’t shake that afternoon’s whiplash, one minute piercingly present to creation and the next slapped by my inattention. What is true? When I picked that ring out of the dirt and slipped it back on my finger, I married Emily all over again and through her the incarnate world of gold and lust and distraction and home, where the spark of life is held and can reliably be found.

I am a practitioner of Centering Prayer (twice daily for 20 minutes) and write as a contemplative practice.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of the novel Hannah, Delivered, the spiritual memoir Swinging on the Garden Gate, a collection of personal essays, On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness, and two books on writing: Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice, winner of the silver Nautilus Award, and Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir. She works independently as a developmental writing coach and teaches through Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.

More on Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s work can be found on our Links page.