Half-Full

The Chicago air is crisp. Boredom is a luxury. Making time for kaffeeklatsch with my friend Matilda is a way of life. She and I hadn’t talked since before Christmas, so we were due to check in with each other yesterday afternoon for our kaffeeklatsch hour that turned into two. One fact about kaffeeklatsch: it determines its own length of time.

At my writing desk, sipping a post-lunch latte, I sat with wintertime thoughts and called Matilda. In the twenty-five-degree air, she was finishing a walk around her neighborhood with her schnauzer. While we chit-chatted, I stared at the struggling monstera plant I inherited in November from a friend who decided not to keep it. The fullness of the air with an outstanding view of the skyline, the plant thrived on his thirty-sixth-floor apartment balcony. But before I could pick it up, the plant got bitten by the first Chicago frost. At first, just the tips of the leaves were burned. When I brought it inside, it went into shock. The holey heart-shaped leaves turned completely brown and clawed as if they were aged hands with arthritic fingers. In her front yard, Matilda observed the Pin Oak tree, reporting to me how her foggy breath crept around the tree’s lush lower branches still full of brittle brown leaves and up through the top branches, barren and skeletal, their tips poking the half-grey sky. From my heated room to the brisk air she walked through, from my moldy Swiss-cheese-looking plant appearing half-dead to the Pin Oak standing with a full skirt of leaves, Matilda and I emptied our minds.

We talked about the need for and challenge of rest and retreat this time of year. We talked about friendships that have come and gone throughout the years. We discussed living through winters with and without these come-and-gone friends and befriending the Midwest winter rather than avoiding it. We discussed the journey of purpose. We reviewed the purpose and benefits of slow living in a culture that rarely seems to lower its speed or turn off. We contemplated how to fill the downtime during the long pause that January, February, and sometimes even March bring. We contemplated the purpose of accumulating the excess of slow fashion that fills our closets. We questioned what would happen if one early morning before sunrise, with the guidance of gentle flames of candlelight, we scooped it all up to donate and limited our wardrobe to twenty-one pieces.

Matilda and I reminisced about our yoga and yoga therapy trainings, of which she completed to be a certified yoga therapist, and I, well, am a half-trained yoga therapist since I quit the program halfway through because, between caring for my mother during her Alzheimer’s and raising my grade-school and high-school children, I needed to let go of something. We reviewed learning about non-attachment to things and circumstances, expectations and people, the “ideal image” of what life, our body, a family, a relationship, a holiday, a single day, or even one’s purpose is supposed to look like. We pondered what would happen if, on another early dark morning with the sureness of a single steady flame of a fresh beeswax pillar candle, we decided to once and for all let go of what burdens us; feel the luggage drop from our shoulders like how hunks of melting snow plummet from rooftops, witness the accumulation at our feet, then walk with our hearts fixed on the promise that forward holds but doesn’t always reveal.

As Matilda and her schnauzer walked into her home and she began making a pot of tea to warm her bones, I finished my latte, the cup stained with a swirled residue of foam. We backtracked to the topics of purpose and the long pause of winter; how we choose to spend our time and how we waste time away; are the pin oak tree and monstera plant thriving or bored while each stands alone with marcescent leaves, one with lofty winter buds and the other with rooted stems, green as spring. We questioned the solitary endeavor of purpose and the practice of solitude. Does solitude consist more of pros or cons? Or is it like a person who is neither introverted nor extroverted but a pleasant mixture of both? What if we broke down the concept of life purpose, which can seem daunting to figure out or unattainable to reach, into the purpose of one experience, one season, one day, or one kaffeeklatsch.

During our kaffeeklatsch yesterday, we paused as winter asked us to. We paused so often that I noticed how the sunset light set our conversation into a tempo with calming words and forth-giving intentions. In our solitary spaces, connected by my wired and her wireless earbuds, we were not fazed by long crescendos of silence. Being comfortable with silence is a sign of good company and something bigger at work on something greater than we can handle. The creek in the pipes in the floor under my radiator and the whistle of Matilda’s tea kettle complemented the quiet between us.

We pondered the meaning of life. We thought about nothing important. Through the nothingness, the quiet, and unanswered questions about purpose, we prayed. By which I mean we talked with a loss for words and with heartfelt intention for our friend who recently lost her son. We prayed for those who make their homes in the thresholds of vacant Chicago storefronts and suburban community park buildings. We prayed for burning California. We prayed for understanding. We prayed for greater love. We prayed for what connects us as a human family because I guarantee you, if you ever find yourself standing at 10:30 PM in Piazza Navona in Rome with a family from Puglia who found your stolen wallet on the steps of the Spagna train station, they are wishing for world peace too. Pace, peace, pace, peace, pace you will say together in broken English and Italian dialect while holding hands and allowing love to speak through genuine connection and hopeful agreement to visit each other’s homes someday in the future.

Matilda and I vowed to see the terrain of winter as necessary and life-giving. We vowed to see what is right with the world. We vowed to see the sky as half-blue rather than half-gray because the sun, indeed, was shining between the frosty clouds. And we decided that pausing and relishing quiet moments during this season of shortened days, cooler air, and fairy lights wrapped around tree branches to brighten the darkness is a very good thing. Voids, loneliness, heartache, grief, and boredom are the marcescent leaves on the tree of life.

But if we take Lester Holt’s simple offering he gives as he signs off his broadcast each weeknight, Please take care of yourself and each other, we will come to realize that our days are half-full after all, and we are made to walk into the sunset together.

Until I write again, each day is a beginning. Rush slowly, and be surprised.

Be light.

Marie