I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
-ee cummings
I was lying still-wet on the floor of a purple bathtub as my mother twisted the washcloth raining a final stream of warmth upon me, the coda to my night’s bath. I was less than three. It’s my earliest memory & I got to share it with her again in one of our regular Saturday chats. She chuckled more at my remembrance than at hers. And we laughed together once more when I recalled a ritual in which I lay in beds as she fluttered a fresh top sheet down upon me, a cloud landing in a meadow.
From where do we learn love? How is it taught to us?…
Nearing ninety-five, mother lives alone on the fourth floor of an
assisted-living condominium that overlooks a duck pond. "I miss my
chicakedees and cardinals," she often tells me, a little confused at
the absecence of birds she fed for seventy years when she lived in a
house, "but I still have my music."
I always think of my mother not as the person who taught me how to sing, but as the one who helped me appreciate the voice of music. I am one of her four children and she taught each of us what was most important – how
to love. And she did this not with instruction but with her presence.
I often ask caregivers who taught them love. They offer beautiful answers. But what touches me most is the look on their faces as they describe their teacher. "It was my late grandmother," someone will say. And as the words fall from their mouths, I can almost see their grandmother sitting behind them smiling.
"It was the doctor who came to my house when I had Scarlet Fever," another will say. And I picture my own family doctor walking into my room with his magic bag, his kind eyes, his cold stethescope, his warm touch.
We learn love not from those who explain the concept to us, but from those who make us feel loved. We learn love from those who accept and affirm us, perhaps when we are feeling judged and rejected by others.
Whenever I see a caregiver leaning to help someone in need, I wonder about this legacy of love. Who awakened in them the seed of kindness? Who was the first to help them climb outside themselves to fill another’s emptiness?
Lots of people spend lots of energy trying to crush our ability to dance. I am glad to have learned the song of love from a kind woman, to know the memory of water wrung from a wash cloth and the fluttering of fresh sheets at bedtime. These are ways Love tells us of her presence in this world.
-Erie Chapman
Today’s poem fragment – from Rilke – The Third Elegy:
Mother, you made him small, it was you who began him,
he was new to you, you bent over his new
eyes the friendly world, and shut out the hostile.
Oh, where are the years when you interposed
your slender figure between him and the seething chaos?
How much you hid from him: the room, nightly suspect,
you made harmless, out of your heart’s refuge
you mingled a more human space into the space of his night.
Not in the dark, but in your nearer presence,
you placed the night lamp, gleaming as in friendship…
Journal of Sacred Work 
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