Passing Up Peace

Sunday was stunning. The wind didn’t blow, the thermometer registered an ideal 80 degrees and the sky, absent of clouds, was that pristine color of blue that is seen only in the Southwest. We had the kayaks loaded and were destined for the Rio Grande. The gates at Elephant Butte dam are open and the water is flowing high.
Conditions were perfect, in ways I could not know.
For the river that would be traveled this day was the Styx, not the Rio Grande.
I was outside when the phone rang. So often I ignore the phone.
Just because it rings doesn’t mean I have to answer, right?
But some spirit thing urged me toward the house and going that way I could hear snippets of the answering machine broadcast, “Need you, Pastor..... Mom....heart attack.... doctors.... ....hours to live....call....please.”
I called.
And I changed into preacher-lady clothes and headed for the hospital.
The mom of the message belonged to my former next-door neighbors, a family who has moved twice since living next to us but we still call neighbors. They are good people…horse people.
Horse people are connected to the earth by a different rein.
Horse people possess more the wisdom of beast than that of man. They understand connectedness with other as a result of years in the saddle, responding to nuance—the flinch of a muscle, the twitch of an ear. Horsemen can spot the slightest change in the disposition, the health, the state of being of their regular mount.
Yet completely miss a similar shift in a human with whom their days are shared.
We sat together, this family and I, around the bed of their dying mother.
She had come to the border area eighty years hence.
Her husband of sixty years rests beneath its rocky desert crust.
She was ready to search for him in worlds beyond this one.
The nurse turned off the machines.
And we waited.
So much is learned about a family in moments such as these. The smooth exterior of self, maintained for the world at-large, erodes and the reality is laid bare for all to see. Raw family truths are out there and at such times, age-old pains and unforgivenesses stored in the gut, nurtured in the cauldron of memory have an opportunity to be released…to simply go the way of the dead.
A tear, a touch, the caress of a hand, a word spoken in love. The offering is made but must be accepted.
I watched the players dance the dance of possibility.
I felt the brush of the olive branch, tenderly offered.
I realized the tragedy of its refusal.
The tensing of body, the back turned in reply, the head bent in sorrow.
The moment was past.
The waters were stirred and healing was so nearly there.
One had but to breathe it in.