What Sustains Me

Today I had my writing group at Angeline’s. (I show up at the homeless women’s day shelter and see if anyone wants to join me for writing, and we publish what they write in The Occasional Times, a newsletter by and for homeless women). My friend Janice joined me, and she had a suggested topic: What Sustains Me? So I wrote the following:

What sustains me? I was thinking about that this morning, wide awake at 5:30 when I needed to get up, aware of my husband’s weariness, the sheer inertia against which he pushed, after a restless night, to start another day. I could feel the weariness a little, but I waited for the buoyant hope to lift me, float up the sunken place behind my eyes, give me the lift to move me through my morning duties.

I don’t know what I’d do, I thought, if I didn’t have it. Don’t know how I’d function, day after day, if I just had to talk myself into moving. Mine is not the fortitude of great determination that powers my sister day after day, fighting off anxiety through bold activity. My movement is more of a floating, held up by a sense of life’s basic joy. I pray for this for my husband and for my sister, not because they need it to function, but because they have a right to joy and peace as they go through their days.

I am sustained by the fundamental joy of life. I am sustained by the sense of goodness - goodness as the law in which we all operate. And I am sustained by Spirit.

I see Spirit in the release of light and comfort that comes when anyone is seen for what she or he is - when their elemental divinity is recognized, or recognizes another. A single smile can unlock it, and the tiniest recognition of that divinity can sustain people for a long time. I try to imagine: what would it be like if we all got used to a lot more? What if we got used to loving and being loved as the baseline for interactions, instead of that rare thing to be occasionally obtained? I think we would save the world.