Thank You

It’s been over 30 years since a friend in Austin Texas gave me some of the best advice a still-young sojourner can get. We had been talking about parent-child relationships—really the complications of my own relationship with my mother and my friend's tapestry of experiences as a divorced mother of three bright, independent-spirited children. As I told the same story again—one that I had revisited over and over and woefully continued to revisit for another three decades—my friend said, “Harold, parents do the best they can. They don’t look at a child in the crib and say, ‘I’m going to f--k you up.’” I don’t ever want to forget that wisdom, even though I am not a parent. My mother is dead three years now, and I still mourn at times that we never made a complete peace, even though she was a wonderful and loyal friend until the very end of her life here. It is what it is.

Relationships of any kind are complicated—friends, siblings, professional, romantic—and we all too easily forget that on any given day we are most likely doing the best we can. On the continuum of our behaviors—if such a model is appropriate for talking about the good and the ugly that we are capable of as human beings—we are making our way in the way that seems to work for us at the time. What any of us does on any given day—how we relate to one another, the peace or joy that we bring to ourselves or that we offer as gifts to others, regardless how small the offering might seem, the “hell on earth” that manifests in similar measure—the sounding of our lives is all part of the journey, the journey home to our center, to the Divine of which we are all expressions, as I was reminded in reading from “Science of Mind” magazine this morning.

Are we dealt a hand? Are we mostly choice makers? Are we victims? We work with life the best we can. Earlier today I saw a group arrive at the nature preserve where I volunteer one morning each week. I didn’t pay much attention, although I noticed that they sat at a picnic table near the visitor center and shared a meal. “Early in the day for lunch,” I thought, but went about my task of filling the feeders with seed and hummingbird nectar. Only later did I realize that the group was made up of three mentally challenged adults and their caregivers, when one of the caregivers brought her charge into the visitor center. With great tenderness, she shepherded the young man around the small visitor center, commenting when I asked if they had enjoyed the trail that it was nice, “but that Jeff was frightened coming back down” the steps that lead up to the trail. “Yes, those steps are challenging,” I remind myself aloud. I walked with them as they left the visitor center, where another of the caregivers waited outside the door, a young man, smiling as he gathered the flock.

Do the next right thing. That is a choice we sentient beings have all day long every day. Here in this sanctuary where some come to work, others to volunteer, and many to walk the trails and delight in the birds, evidence of other wildlife and the typography above 7000’, I am reminded as visitor after visitor comes into the center—most eager to talk about the experience of just being here—I am blessed, once again—in remembering the health I enjoy and the independence that I assume each day is my very right. One visitor this morning from Florida walked the lower trail while his wife, who wasn’t up to the challenge, waited in the car. He came into the center to thank me—“No, thank you,” I’m thinking—telling me that he had seen a Spotted Towhee on the trail, as if this had made his day. I noticed earlier in the morning a small group pushing two of their companions in wheelchairs up to the small landing that leads to the trailhead. One of them came into the center to say, “Thank you,” telling me that they were from one of the pueblos nearby. “No, thank you,” I’m thinking. And so it is.

Thank You--Santa Fe, New Mexico (May 18, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis