take the call.
When does delight taste best? At the very moment when you enter the shade from a walk on a sun-high morning with no hat or sunglasses thanks to the forgetfulness of rising a full hour late from a dense forest of fatigue, and, if you’re honest, a trap of sadness you set for yourself in a field of metaphors that jangled your sense of bad poetry down to its bones, the stoic in you getting a shit-kicking by the wild gal out in the sticks who’s fallen hook-line-&-sinker for a November-born water creature known for exchanging oxygen for words in remarkable ways and speaking in liquid love languages that spread in fire, land, and air and who invites vapor-gathering wizardry to translate signs and track disappearances in the submerged places where stones allow for shadows and light in a depth of retrospect all the way back to when the worlds were made.
I am deep into the riparian separation from all of that fluid mysticism when tones sound and the buzz in my pocket trembles my thigh awake at the same exact moment my head receives shelter from an overhang of conifer branches. The phone appears in my palm like magic and the screen reads OC. I feel the gift as it’s given.
Without missing a beat, I exaggerate my southern drawl and say, “Is this a butt call?” to which OC says, and I can tell she is smiling, “No, this is NOT a butt call!” and we both laugh. The next full hour is spent with the good medicine of a Colorado friend who knows the Tao like the back of her hand and who listens well to my California lament and reminds me as she often does, to be clear with myself about what I need and to make that part of my work. Then she remembers something of what she was studying just yesterday and asks if she can share it with me, and as I always do with my teachers, I say, “Of course!” Then she pulls me in with an authority I’ve learned to trust over some long-ass, bumpy territory. “Ready?” OC signals. “If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job….” She takes me by the shoulders through some long distance finagling and says, “Think about it like this. Today your job is knowing what you need. Being really clear, specific.” I am uplifted. Jolted into a better posture.
An hour later I am writing with Sisters of the Pen, my weekly writing group. The prompt given is a recent pleasant surprise. As I arrive at the final minutes of writing time, I reread the bright words I scribbled as OC recited again for me the teaching she offered during our call: “If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job….” I tell myself to pay attention from the place where love and story meet. For today, my job is to understand just what it is that I need. And maybe to be brave enough to say so.
