Showing Up

Easter morning, April 12th. It is snowing heavily on Taos desert, the mountains shrouded, everything brought in close. I look up into a fall of feathers, it doesn't seem possible that snowflakes can drop thousands of feet, not when a small wind can blow them sideways in a crisscross pattern. It is 7am and the bridge looms over the gorge filled with bouncing snow, its road surface covered with a slick whiteness. It's at once improbable and expected, and as high desert dwellers are ready for anything, and love all weather, there are 70 people huddled under the open air wooden shelter facing the yawning gorge. People are layered up, hats pulled down tight, the dark haired heads of toddlers and infants swimming in giant parka hoods of blue and magenta. Older men greet me with crescent pouches under their eyes, smiling, not old as much as broken in. Some of the women are wearing colorful scarves wrapped around their hair; it reminds me of my childhood in the 70s when more women seemed to wear them, and project mystery and bright eyed destiny in the face of boredom. The reverend Steve Wiard, a Kansan with a broken voiced optimism, a cornfield skipping boy of 60 who loves the red sox and amber beer, paces before the huddled group in his red tartan blanket coat with charcoal crosses in subtle relief on front and back. He is smiling, his salt-and-pepper ponytail spilling and curling out of his blue baseball cap, and telling us that he does not know exactly what happened that day of Christ's resurrection, that it's a mystery. But he knows something happened that turned those people around that day. And he knows that showing up is the key. 70 people in driving snow, 27 degrees, singing songs of peace, and listening to a preacher with a sun faded blue red sox cap whose voice cracks with excitement and wonder and who injects the still unmarred buoyancy of a ten year old who knows anything is possible. You can't see the mountain today but you know it's there. And I don't know what it means, but it feels good to be around people at 7am listening to a guy with whom you'd trade baseball cards and drink beers while watching a ballgame. As he spoke, I looked out to the west to a lone cottonwood standing firm in the snowfall; a single, sturdy tree on a desert at the edge of a massive gorge allowing the snow to collect on it, at the edge of my visibility, nothing behind it but a field of gray while people sing and recite and hug in many colors also on the edge of that wide opening. Something? It reminds me that I read an article last night on David Foster Wallace, a great writer who killed himself months ago at 46. In his last novel, an unfinished work, he wrote of an IRS agent who found himself in the grip of such immense boredom that he thought he'd never recover without hurting himself, or hurling himself away. But he finds a way to stick it out, to be right in it, to use it as practice, and the boredom fades into another state where there is nothing but openness, and he is joyful. He doesn't know what this is, and it doesn't seem like anything but he is spacious. I took that with me as I fell to sleep last night, and I had it with me at the sunrise service in the snow. I don't know what it is, but it exists. Practice, showing up, even if it's mechanical, will lead to joy and peace. Believe me, I know how simple and even trite that sounds. And it doesn't happen right away, and maybe not for a while, but it happens. And I'm not preaching Jesus or any religion, but there's something about showing up. And there's something about being there. I don't know what it is, but it's something.