|
Dear Friend, Sometimes the heart suddenly drops all its weapons, all its armor: a dog enters a café, a father unconsciously makes his voice go high as he coos to his baby daughter. Or you simply see the tied-together laces of someone’s shoes, your neighbor’s on the train, snugly securing his two innocent feet. Such a disarmament happened recently. Laura and I were dropping off produce at Noah’s Anchorage, a shelter for children in Santa Barbara, when we noticed that the shelter was giving away free backpacks as school resumes. To see the row of new backpacks carefully displayed in the garage caught my heart off guard and blew it open. Imagine the situation. Fate rolls the dice and suddenly you find yourself fourteen-years-old, without parents who are able, without much money, and so you walk over to Noah’s Anchorage on West Figueroa Street because you hear they give out food, clothes, and new backpacks. You see one that catches your eye. It has flowers on it. In “Grace and Grit,” a book about tending to his dying wife, Ken Wilber writes: Real love hurts; real love makes you totally vulnerable and open; real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you. I kept thinking, if love does not shatter you, you do not know love. We had both been practicing the wound of love, and I was shattered. Who among us doesn’t know such shattered-ness? Who among us doesn’t live with that sense of a wound, the wound of love? Who among us doesn’t feel gut-hurt in the face of the beauty and suffering of it all? The challenge, it seems, is to make of the gut-hurt, of the shattered-ness, a source of energy, a source of inspiration. To make it into food, into something that sustains us. “I am certain of nothing,” said poet John Keats, “but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections.” It was a privilege to act on the “Heart’s affections” recently by giving lettuces, tomatoes, zucchinis, yellow squash, eggplants, eggs, citrus, and flowers to the children at Noah’s Anchorage. And it was heartening to hear that the children who make use of the shelter are requesting such produce (and not always requesting chicken nuggets!). A staff member at Noah’s said he was excited to make a roasted vegetable pasta and zucchini bread with the children. Sincerely, Teddy Macker Executive Director at Whole Harvest Farm
|
