They tell me I can’t stay with him. They are going to do their best to heal my son. He is four years old and getting weaker by the minute. 

“Please!” Andrew calls out as the medical team in their scrubs forcibly restrain him. “I’m not ready!” As if blond hair matted with fever, and not even in kindergarten, he is marshaling his resources and can get ready if they will just give him time.

The surgeon stops on his way to the operating room to explain what this emergency operation will entail and to suggest we wait up in Andrew’s room on the pediatric floor. The doctor’s surgical mask dangles limply around his neck. He is handsome and very young. We could have easily been in the same AP biology class at Northeast High, a public school in a working-class neighborhood.

Upstairs in Andrew’s room, my husband and I sit awkwardly on two straight-backed chairs, afraid to touch anything, as if by being very good waiting parents, we can somehow help our son. An infection has lodged in his elbow that could move to his brain or heart at any time. The doctor says the result would be “unacceptable.” Down the hall, I hear the muffled sounds of a child crying, and for a moment, I picture my life without Andrew. I turn to his father. “Do you ever think about losing one of the children?”

“Of course not,” is the immediate response. I marvel at his unpreparedness. His brazen assumption that the universe is a place of abundance. This will be the difference between us for a long, long time. 

Hours pass, and the door opens. The surgeon stands silhouetted in the frame. “Your son did great,” he reports. “He’s in recovery and should be waking up soon.” Relief floods the room like light from the hall. For the next six weeks, Andrew will require intravenous antibiotics around the clock, but with a port left in his slender arm, we can be taught to administer them at home. My husband is jubilant. Once again, his expectations have been rewarded.  

The door bumps open, and strangers lift Andrew from a gurney onto the waiting bed. He is incoherent, eyes closed, and over the next several hours his face crumples into silent, waterless tears in his sleep. It is almost as if it is not his pain they anesthetized but his ability to communicate it. I fight an impulse to slip off my shoes and climb onto the bed to cover him, healing his body with my own. Gratitude so intense I understand it is joy, makes me believe that I can.

Twelve years later, my husband and I are outside stacking the woodpile. It is a blue and gold fall afternoon, unseasonably warm. I want to take off my work gloves, but the gleeful dog will run off with them.

Andrew slept late and has been in his room most of the day. Occasionally I hear the bathroom door open and close, but no Nirvana blasting down the steps, no telephone. Still, he is home and that means safe, so I go about my chores until suppertime. 

Climbing the stairs, I see there is no light on in Andrew’s room even though the sun has sunk beneath the horizon. There is a soft groan from the bed. He doesn’t feel well he says, and I am shocked to see he is actually under the navy spread. His head hurts; he was up all night, that’s why he’s been trying to sleep. I’m the mother of a teenage boy and skeptical. His father and I went to a movie last night. Maybe someone came over. Cheek to forehead, I feel for fever, bring him ice water and Tylenol, straighten his covers, and go back downstairs, worried about all the wrong things.

I’m scrubbing the pan in which I caramelized pork chops when an apparition appears. Andrew, his face white, squints in the painful light. His head hurts so badly, he says. He grasps the back of a kitchen chair and utters an explicative that is so out of character it breaks the spell of doubt. There are no longer skeptics in the room, only one very sick boy and two suddenly terrified parents. 

We ease Andrew into a chair to ask more detailed questions. When his father asks him to touch his chin to his chest and he can’t, I run for a blanket and the keys to the car. I’ve just reviewed the symptoms of spinal meningitis, and Andrew has all of them.

In the emergency room, he is in so much pain he can barely stay conscious. The pediatrician on duty is a tiny young woman with barrettes in her long dark hair whose shoes must be the size of our seven-year-olds. Andrew lies on the table while she attempts a spinal tap, and my husband grips Andrew’s hands in his own. Every wave of pain that crosses Andrew’s face sweeps across his father’s a second later. He has the position I want in the small room, but I was delayed registering our insurance information. Also, my husband has so rarely been home that there is something sacred about my exclusion. I stand mesmerized, watching as if I don’t know them when in this moment, they are all that I know. 

Again and again, the doctor attempts to get the needle in Andrew’s spine. Her face is flushed; it distresses her to hurt him. She swabs Andrew’s spine, her small deft hands puncturing him again and again. She’s a pediatrician, a children’s doctor. My son, an adolescent, is as tall as his father–a boy in a man’s body. “Stop! It’s the needle,” I say. “The needle must be too small.”

Things go quickly, then. The tap complete, Andrew is admitted. He does indeed have spinal meningitis.

Over the next week, Andrew is kept on intravenous antibiotics and painkillers. His sickness is viral, excruciating, but non-fatal. We bring him pajamas, flowers, and photos of Kaya, his dog. His little sister comes along delighted with the drama and envious that Andrew gets tapioca on a tray. Red Jello. He offers her both with a smile.

We visit every day. Totally present. While Andrew sleeps, I listen to a mother across the hall reading to her child. Her voice is soft with a Japanese accent. “And if you become a boat, I’ll become the wind, and blow you home to me.”  

To pass the time, we recount Andrew’s exploits as a boy– the raft made from detergent bottles, the racing go-cart he designed with the cinderblock brake on a string. And we laugh, touching each other lightly on a shoulder or sleeve, then hush ourselves as if we’ve spoken aloud in a library.

We recall the sleepless nights of the intravenous IVs when Andrew was four, and as the days wear on, the room fills with such tenderness that I’m afraid to acknowledge it for fear it will disappear. 

The day Andrew is discharged, I take down photos taped to the cupboard doors, throw out flowers that have withered. In my exuberance over his recovery, I have to keep myself from talking too much; from repeating the discharge instructions more times than necessary. Parental love is different from other kinds, I think as we drive home. There is an intensity born of gratitude, an element of faith, or at least hope implied in its endurance.

And then you let go. The grand design of the universe requires relentless relinquishment. Your kids move about the world, create families, dream new dreams, and life becomes an effort to stay off stage but in the auditorium. To witness without wanting. They tell me I can’t stay with him. 

If you become a boat, I think, I won’t become the wind, trying to blow you home to me. I’ll become the sea, carrying you wherever you need to go. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

   

 

I have a confession. 

When I go for a walk, I call it a hike. 

I only call it a walk if there is a black-and-white terrier involved. Which is ironic because then you could call it a pull, a drag, the Iditarod, or a squirrel hunt. 

Also, in the confession category—I don’t like to walk with friends. (Sorry not sorry.) If our aim is to talk, let’s not be bumping shoulders on the sidewalk for a stroller to squeeze past or for the entire cross-country team of the local high school to stream around us like rocks in a river. Let’s relax on the front porch swing with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, crusty French bread, and some cheese. Or, in a pinch, Pringles. 

But the evidence that walking is good for you is overwhelming. I have a friend who, as a trauma physician, accumulated so much grief and emotional injury to his psyche that he walked 1,000 miles on the Pacific Coast Trail to heal his wounded soul. His boots leaked, the elevations were grueling, but he also encountered birdsong, stunning vistas, and trail angels—people who showed up at just the right moment with medical tape, steaming black coffee, cell phone chargers, and words of cheer. Sometimes they had set up stations at the approach to towns where they might be anticipated, but often they just appeared when most needed. 

I had an experience with a trail angel of sorts, only the trail was a bridge after a hurricane. I was in a prolonged period of fear and ambivalence where I could not see the way forward when one night what began as a dream became something else–an experience in another dimension perhaps. You tell me.

I dreamed I was driving across the Spa Creek bridge with my dog, Kaya after a storm with hurricane-force winds had raised seawater levels to astonishing heights, far higher than even a storm at full moon pulls the tide. 

The river was swollen so high that the bridge was submerged beneath several feet of creek water, and in my dream, the lanes no longer had guardrails. As I started to cross, I realized that without any reference points, I’d have to drive blind and just hope I stayed on the pavement beneath the water. If I turned the wheel even one foot in the wrong direction, I’d steer right off the invisible edge and sink. 

This fear was realistic because, unaided, human beings are unable to navigate a straight line. We can fly drones on Mars and find our way to other galaxies, but without landmarks (a church steeple, a distant mountain peak, a constellation), we instinctively move in circles. No one knows why, but one theory is that every step contains a misstep that compounds over time without a landmark by which to course correct. Blindfolded or just lost in the forest, without a visual point of reference we naturally loop back on ourselves. We will never find our way out of the woods. Without help, we will never find our way home.

So, with all the sophistication of a 12-year-old, I got out of the car and stood in front of it, thinking perhaps I could feel my way by wading—I could walk a few feet at a time feeling the pavement beneath me, then get back in the car to drive those few yards, stop and repeat.

I was standing there debating the merits of this game plan when something enveloped me as gently as thought—with the substance of air—and tenderly lifted me right off my feet. Enfolded by light, held in spun gold, this force carried me up and up until I was maybe 30 feet in the air. 

My sleeping self told my conscious self, “Something astounding is happening. Remember this,” just as the force began moving towards the east side of the creek. Stunned, I felt myself literally carried to the opposite shore, where I was tenderly lowered to the ground. 

I woke up astonished, mentally reviewing the experience in order to translate its meaning. The sensation of being lifted and carried was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. But because the barrier between the materialized world we inhabit and the world of spirit from which we came is a foreign country, we have no common language. Communication with spirit is by necessity the very essence of sign language, with both its limitations and elegance. 

I lay there puzzling out how to tell someone else what I’m telling you now. “Last night, I was carried over troubled waters,” I thought. “Something carried me from fear and confusion to the place I was trying to go.” 

In the still of the night, with only the whisper of the fan overhead, I suddenly understood. 

This was not a dream; it was a promise. Not just for me, but for all of us. 

The earth spins through space in the key of B flat, elephants grieve their dead, heat lightning is a myth, but singing sand is real.  

I want to understand all of it—every magical fact that is neither magic nor supernatural—but the mind-blowing nature of creation. How could I have lived most of my life not knowing most stars are binary? How could I have not understood the phases of the moon, or that compressed, the ozone layer that is the reason life even exists on this planet, is the thickness of two pennies? That the hottest stars in the universe are born and burn blue?

 Look up, look up!

The pattern for everything is all around you. The whorl of fine hair on a baby’s head is the spiral of a nautilus, the spiraling arms of the galaxy embracing you. It is the circle in which you would inevitably walk without help, without landmarks. Without trail angels to inspire you. And you are mine.  

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

Twice in my life, a stranger has commented that I’m a dead ringer for someone famous. This always fills me with dread. Let’s start with the basics. Is the famous person a man or a woman? How old?

Most recently, I was paying for a dress at White House Black Market, and the very sweet sales clerk said, “Oh my gosh! You remind me so much of someone—she’s an actress on a TV show, I just can’t think of her name.” 

“Ready for my credit card?” I asked, nudging it toward her. 

“No, wait! It’ll come to me…”

“Ha ha, you can just put the receipt in the bag,” I said, eyeing the store’s entrance back into the mall.

“Wait! You look JUST like her! It’s that show, Frankie and Grace! Have you ever seen it?” she asked. 

The truth is no, I’ve never watched the show, but I’ve seen the promotions for it. It’s about two old-lady friends—which I have for real–and I know who the stars are.

I said a quick prayer and offered hopefully, “Well, one of the stars is Jane Fonda.”

(pleasepleaseplease.)

“Nope,” she said, still searching her cheerful brain. 

I looked at her sadly. “One ringy-dingy, two ringy dingies.”

“That’s it!” she chortled. “Lily Tomlin!”  

“It’s my small eyes,” I complained when I got home. “They used to be bigger. I’m having them enlarged! Immediately!” 

I grew up in a household where self-improvement was the main theme. So, though I do look in a mirror several times throughout the day, what looks like vanity is more like spiritual scrutiny—it’s not to admire myself—it’s to improve myself. Somehow, “How can I be a better person, (Mom’s message) got fused with “How can I be a better-looking person?” (Society’s message.)

So, here’s the tricky part. 

If I am one of these things, which we judge to be superficial, I seem to automatically become the other, which is what it’s all about. Because on the rare occasions I feel pretty, I am a better person! I’m kinder, more generous, and present for those around me. I stop thinking about myself. I flirt with babies in the dog park. I contribute to St. Jude’s at every cash register, bring my neighbor’s trashcans in, and overtip at the Bistro. It’s as if happiness fuses with kindness and weirdly, they feel like love. And love is generative. Like radiation. Like light. In those brief moments of confidence, I’m a floodlight. And maybe that kind of unselfconscious love is also a searchlight. It illuminates any similar energy in your path. 

I was looking for a gift in Anthropologie yesterday, and an appealing young man whose mother probably called him “pumpkin head” was holding his own 8-month-old baby boy in front of one of the mirrors while his wife paid for a pair of earrings. The baby was the picture of health—rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes, a head as perfectly round as a soccer ball. 

I couldn’t stop smiling at them because they were beautiful, and with all the pain and violence in the world, appreciating beauty is a soul-healing prescription I’ve made as natural as breathing. Placing your attention on the gifts strewn in your path is like setting your energy dial to receiving the sacred. 

But it wasn’t this pair’s physical beauty that was compelling. It was their joy. This dad and his baby boy adored each other, and my smile was for the existence of love itself. The baby caught my eye, and his face lit up. His dad brought him over. 

“This is Troy,” the young father said. 

“He’s precious,” I said.

“Thankfully, he looks like his mother,” the dad said. But that wasn’t true. I could see the mother. She did not have this dad’s crystal blue eyes and radiant smile. Love was making Dad happy, and happiness is always generous. They returned to the mirror, and I sent them a silent blessing –a wish for their continued well-being and delight.

We fill up in so many ways: romance, work, family duties, exercise, travel, philanthropy. We pour energy into the empty place and call it life. We call it “what I did today,” but we are almost always in acquisition mode. In the subtle search-for-meaning-mode.

But blessings flip the energy. They are a desire from the inside out for another’s good fortune. And what makes them more than a wish and closer to a prayer is that, in a way, a blessing says, “I’m asking that something bigger than I am protects you and grants you joy.” Do we have that ability? To bless each other? Without religion or rules? To say to the universe, “I don’t have any authority here, but could you please bestow love by proxy?” I hope so.

Because I feel it all the time, the desire to bless. The man on a rickety bike who looks like he needs a car. The woman fanning herself at the bus stop when it’s sweltering, the patient in the ambulance blasting by, the lumbering, overweight jogger doing his best. Bless you, bless you, bless you. 

Does the bus come faster? Does the bicyclist get a car? Does the patient make it to the hospital? Does the runner get a second wind?

When I was very pregnant with my first child, it was time to say goodbye to a pastoral therapist I’d been seeing. I was done. He had been the first person in my life to identify the hole in my soul, and, as Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” Although I still have much to learn, it was time to close this chapter.

He put his hands gently on my belly, held them there, and closed his eyes. “If I have a blessing in me,” he said, “it’s yours.” I was struck by the fact that he qualified his statement. “If he had a blessing?” He was an ordained minister. He wasn’t sure? But he was also just a human being with failings. And neither of us could know anything with certainty.

It was a hot August evening. The crickets sang as if song alone could delay the arrival of autumn, and the sweet, humid air was still. I walked to the car, gravel crunching beneath my sandals, heavy with child and slightly heavy of heart. I looked back at the little church with a sense of closure and accomplishment, but when something good comes to an end, it takes a while for “good” to outweigh “over.” As I started the car, I chose to believe perfection was neither possible nor required. 

Joy is radiation. Love is a benediction. I pulled onto the road home, knowing I’d been blessed. The baby I would greet as the leaves turned gold had been blessed.

And if I have a blessing in me now, it is yours. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

My great-great grandmother, Mary Jane Aten and her husband Robert, set out in their horse and buggy on a cold November afternoon in 1900 to visit their son Henry in the town of Vermont, Illinois. Along the way, they stopped in Table Grove for lunch with their daughter, Flora, staying for a couple of hours of roast turkey and talk. When they resumed their journey, they closed the buggy’s side curtains against the autumn wind, and Robert snugged down the earflaps on his brown cap. Mary Jane leaned against him, bundled up tight in a coat with a hood.   

This is why, the theory goes, they never heard the train at the crossing two miles north of Vermont where the CB and Q road crosses the tracks. Robert drove the buggy onto the rails, directly into the path of the train barreling toward them. The conductor saw the carriage, applied the brakes, and frantically blew the whistle, causing the horse to freeze. Barely able to slow, the train plowed into them at near full speed. 

In an instant the buggy was kindling, no piece left bigger than the wheels. The bulk of it remained on the train’s pilot. When the crew doubled back, they found the horse was uninjured—though the force of the impact had stripped him of his bridle and harness. 

My great-great-grandparents had been married since 1852 and had nine children. But what moves me about this story is where and how they were found. Robert 82 and Mary Jane 72 were discovered lying together on the bank—Robert’s arm flung outward, and Mary Jane cradled in the crook of it—as if they were sleeping. Their catastrophic wounds were invisible—their clothing untorn– and her hair, long and still dark, remained tied back like a girl’s.

Ridiculously, I’m grateful more than 100 years later that an obedient horse was not hurt. And less ridiculously, that two people who were ahead of me in the family line stayed married for more than half a century and loved nine children. I like how that feels because I’ve been seeking a solid sense of self for most of my adult years. 

My father left when I was so young that when, at 36, I saw him seated next to my mother at Capers for brunch, I was silently stunned. It was as if I had been swimming off the deep end all my life, and my toes had just touched the bottom. Suddenly I was someone new—someone with parents—not just a mother. For the first time, there was solid ground beneath my feet. I felt like I came from somewhere. And we all need that– our origin story—and I’ve come to realize an origin story starts long before your parents. It begins as far back as you need it to. 

You can look for clues in a variety of places, family history, stories like Robert’s and Mary Jane’s, and even your genetic makeup–which is why I was excited when I was gifted with one of the very first DNA test kits to come on the market.

At last, I would discover more clues as to who I am from the inside out. I expected to have Robert and Mary Jane’s English and Scottish ancestry confirmed and hoped for a surprise or two. I sent in my samples, waited a week, and logged onto the internet using a private barcode to see the results of what the company called cutting-edge science. The results of my DNA sample were depicted graphically as a target overlaying the ten countries whose populations most closely match my genetic identity. I stared expectantly at northern Europe, but there was nothing there. Nothing. 

“So,” the ever-helpful Mr. Oliver said as we scrutinized the screen. “Your primary countries of origin are… Tanzania…” he pushed back from the computer to assess me quizzically, then turned back to the screen, “and Mozambique.” 

“Surprise,” he said, but he said it in Leah-the-dog’s voice—which is how we often communicate around here when we want to deflect emotion or, as in this case, we just want to make the other person laugh.

Not a drop of Scottish or English blood. “That can’t be me!” I snapped, indignant and inexplicably offended. Because I had assumed the accuracy of the results and they didn’t jibe with what I knew to be true, I was caught in a space-time anomaly in which I had no identity at all. I think I felt huffy because I felt tricked. 

But in reading the fine print, I realized the company’s claim that its analysis was as personal as a fingerprint was valid because it was also just as worthless in decoding ancestry. Their business was analyzing “Junk” DNA, which is non-coding, and though we are still searching, it seems to have no purpose at all, even though it comprises more than 75% of your entire genome. Technically, however, the company was correct. Since early man walked out of Africa, it’s everyone’s home address. When the major religions of the world claim, “we are one,” and anthropologists refer to the “family of man,” they are not wrong.

Until 1972 Junk DNA was referred to as “Selfish DNA.” It seemed to exist only for itself. Maybe that has been its undoing. Why it now sits in our genome, no longer sending instructions to make us who we are but as a record of where we have been. 

Body, mind, spirit—we walked out of Africa with all three intricately linked and evolving only to demonstrate that what exists only for itself loses dominion.

My great-great grandparents’ lives ended bookended by family—a son in Vermont, a daughter in Table Grove. Like them, may we all die knowing who we are, in the arms of someone we love.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here. 

 

  

Editor’s Note: Our Spy Creative Director is on vacation, therefore we are reprising a column that originally appeared June 5th of last year. 

Have you seen this? An unshaven man in crumpled khakis and a worn shirt sits cross-legged on a cold, DC street corner with a tin cup at his feet. In his hands, he grips a square of cardboard upon which is printed, “I’m blind. Please help.” 

Well-dressed professionals clip past in their Stuart Weitzmans and Cole Haans on their way to professional jobs in plush offices with fake Ficus trees in accent-lit lobbies. Pretty women pause, dig in shiny shoulder bags, then toss in a quarter. Other passersby rush on, eyes averted. 

A slim young woman with dark hair pulled back in a bun—maybe 18, 19– passes the man as well but stops and turns back. Kneeling in front of him, she gently pulls the cardboard from his hands, extracts a marker from her backpack, and flips his sign over. As the bewildered man waits, unable to see what she’s doing, she scrawls a new message on the reverse side, hands the sign back, and walks on. 

Over the course of the day, elapsed in U-Tube time, people stream past the blind man as before, except now, nearly everyone stops to place cash in his cup. Coins drop like rain, a flood of thoughtful compassion. The afternoon wears on, and the perplexed man continues to hold up the sign the young woman has written. His cup overflows.

As shadows lengthen at the end of the business day, the woman returns from the opposite direction. When she greets him, the man recognizes her voice. “What did you do to my sign?” he asks helplessly. He is confused by his new success, the magic of what she has done. She responds I wrote the same but in different words.

As the camera pans out, the sign becomes visible. In black block print, the girl has written, “It’s a beautiful day, and I can’t see it.”

Words change everything. Luck, energy, desire, vision—how you see the world and those with whom you share it. 

Last Christmas, I had one of those circle-of-friends candleholders on my coffee table; only the ‘friends’ were 3 elves, facing inwards, their little backs to the observer, holding hands around a lit votive. As I moved them to put a pizza down, I mentioned to my friend Rick that the little guys appeared to be circled around the glow of a burning log in a cold forest. 

Rick, whose job description includes words like “covert,” “Pentagon,” and “flight schedule,” said dispassionately, “Yeah? I think they’re hiding something.”

Perspective. Like everything else, it’s a story we tell ourselves based on our experience of the past. That doesn’t make it true, nor a prediction of what’s to come. 

My three kids have lived all over this country and all over the world, and I have missed them. My son left home at 17 to live in New Zealand for more than a decade. One daughter lived in New Orleans for years, then Vermont. Another daughter moved to the United Kingdom 12 years ago, and I can’t imagine she will ever live closer than an ocean away. I have missed weddings and births. Friends with kids nearby have felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for me, too.

Then I wrote the same story but with different words. 

The kids are happy. They call home. They have created meaningful lives. They have found people they love. 

It’s a beautiful day. And I can see it. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

Sophie, the robin who has been sitting on three blue eggs in the pink dogwood just outside my office window, abandoned ship last night. The nest was a magnificent structure. To make the interior soft and bowl-shaped, she had pressed her rounded breast into the grass and twigs she’d gathered and painstakingly plastered with mud. She shaped it like a potter might use his hands; only Sophie-bird had used her heart. 

A crow discovered the nest two days ago and swept in for repeated attacks. I’d warded off two assaults myself, but I knew the crafty crow, a hulking black shadow, a menace to all small things that sing, would inevitably succeed in this lethal mission, and he did.

Yes, Sophie was one of a billion robins, collectively known as a “worm” of robins—like a “pride” of lions and a “murder” of crows. And yes, statistics indicate that only 25% of birds fledged in summer, make it even to fall, but she was a good mother. Or at least the best she could be.

And that kills me. That good wasn’t good enough.

Self-improvement was a major theme in the house of my childhood, and I need to get a handle on this. Good never feels good enough, remorse never feels deep enough, and you cannot be grateful enough for the gifts you’ve been given. (I won’t argue with that last one.)

I was thinking about these things lying in a float tank—a sensory deprivation chamber. I signed up for this hour session somewhat impulsively because I’d always been curious—what on earth would happen if I turned off my brain? I’d heard that the experience is unique and lends itself to emotional insight, healing, and spiritual revelations. (I’m not known for low expectations.)

I arrived for my session in a ponytail and no makeup. I was going to be in water up to my ears for an hour and then showering off the Epsom Salts that would make me as buoyant as a balloon, so the normal morning routine had been swapped for “dear-God-don’t-let-me-run-into-anyone-I-know.”

The float chamber itself had been a stunning surprise. If you’ve ever been to a grotto, like the one on the island of Capri, where the sunlight seems to shine upwards from the white sea floor making the water pristine blue and alive with light, it was like that. As if blue and light had merged to be a living thing. And the ceiling of the float chamber was covered in glittering stars! We know I was charmed.

After taking a peek into it from my private outer room and having showered at home, I got undressed, then opened the chamber door and lowered myself into water the color of the sky and the temperature of my skin. 

When ready, I could push a button with a wet salty hand to turn out the chamber lights so that only the stars lit the darkness. But I had been advised to use a second button to eventually turn out the stars as well. Floating in the absence of light, as if in the womb, would provide the ultimate float experience. 

I lay there, reluctant to relinquish the stars. They are themselves evidence of a living universe, but I did eventually hit the button in search of the greater experience. The water held me just as it must have held me in the womb. I could open my eyes, and there was no difference in having them shut. I was sightless. Sort of weird. Sort of utero. Except, I probably wasn’t thinking thoughts in the womb.

Okay, that’s a lie, I probably was, but I was definitely still thinking thoughts here. I wanted to turn my brain off, but I came to understand that my internal mental chatter was not the result of outside stimuli. With all external stimuli eliminated, the mind monkeys were having a barn dance and had invited rowdy friends on scooters. 

I tried concentrating on my breathing and on the water itself—which some call silky, not slimy. But after what I’d determined to be about 40 minutes (with deadly accuracy, it turns out), I resorted to amusing myself. What would happen if I put my feet down? Made the water ripple? If I died and became suddenly limp, in what position would they find my body? My hands seemed to always float to my hips—like Wonder Woman! Like someone who died bossing everyone around! I had earplugs in, but I could feel water seeping in around them and started worrying about getting salt crystals in my ears. 

I tried harder to find heaven. 

Where was the spiritual revelation? The emotional insight? The healing? I’ve got conundrums, and I’d provided the blankest slate I could muster to no avail. After a while, I started pinging myself off the sides of the tank, floating from left to right, pushing off with my toes. 

I was a float fail. I tanked the float-tank experience.

The times I’ve been graced by the presence of spirit have come unbidden, have descended like a cloud. Like the night before surgery, when I’d been waiting three weeks in excruciating anxiety for a specialist from Georgetown to join my surgeon at Anne Arundel Medical Center.

I was awakened by gratitude—a soft, living presence that entered the room as gently as light, flooding my body and saturating my being so thoroughly that I could only lie in the dark and weep for the reality of a living love. I lay there just ridiculous with gratitude because I knew that if my surgery revealed the presence of a terminal illness, it would somehow be the experience I was born for. I didn’t feel assured that I would not be sick, only that if I were, all was well. All was perfect.

Sometimes God has arrived in a flash of intuition where I suddenly knew something I could not possibly know. Spirit has shown up as someone I’m meeting for the first time who feels like home. But God has never arrived when I was looking. Or testing. Or bargaining. 

Instead, God has always materialized in ways I cannot anticipate. Do you search for the air you breathe? That’s the way love manifests, I thought, lying there in the primal dark. Grace is a presence for whom you can only open the door.

And with that revelation, I turned on the stars. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.