Journal of Sacred Work

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It our great contribution to the arts. 
– Ken Burns

    They are the magic moments in our lives. They are the times when every bit of our best energy seems aligned with the world’s best energy. Light and heat flow through us. The words used to describe this feeling never do it justice: euphoria, flow, the zone, ecstasy. None of these touch the essence of this all too evanescent feeling.
   But there is one quasi word that at least signals the nature of this phenomenon. It is synchrony. We speak of feeling synchronized, or even "in sync."  And when we use this language we are invariably talking about alignment. Mechanical gears only work when they are synchronized. Teams only succeed in emergencies when they are in sync… 

   What is surprising is how much of synchrony appears to happen randomly – even automatically. In this week’s group of reflections about improvisation, commentators have offered some of their thoughts about the magic of happenstance. And each of us finds that improvisation is hard to analyze.
 
For caregivers, some of life’s biggest events must seem so random. The old woman dying in room 5028 was once a neighbor of the nurse who now sits with her in her final moments. The baby in the delivery room has a congenital abnormality because of the particular combination of a mother and father who met and fell in love by another set of chance meetings. The accident victim in the ER lies paralyzed because he traveled a particular road to the grocery store just at the moment when a drunk driver came the opposite way.
   Reflections on synchrony led me to wonder about the randomness of my own life. Why has my heart continued to beat so long when so many millions of hearts stop too soon? Why does life seem to pass slowly in some moments and fast at others? Is this even the existence that counts?

This Heart
 

When this heart stops,
sooner than I think,
my other one will
resume its cadence. 

Before my other heart
restarts, I’d like to thank
the one I’ve got for improvising
his way around all the sudden
changes: The times I made my
legs run, the way this heart beat for me
during courtroom trials & hospital
emergencies, his rapid resumption
after each one of my several thousand
sneezes, how he didn’t give out
in the midst of laughter or love,
the fashion in which he bled during
every loss returning always
to his normal rhythm. 

I’d like to thank, as well, your
heart, the one that lives now as
you read this. It is your heart,
that informed your beauty & our life.
If it weren’t for her, none of my heart
beats would matter. 

We all live the same amount.
We all share the same soul. 

Each heart marks out its time,
skip-racing the arc of the world, 

six billion hearts throbbing
until each one, one by one,
falls silent, as this one will, letting
my other heart resume, the one that
doesn’t need air or blood or energy,
the one that will breathe near you
until you join me in the house beyond
Mother Time.

-Erie Chapman