Earlier this Summer I was in big anxiety about someone I love who is sick. I stewed for a few hours and found the company of friends to be no solace. On a friend's advice I found the courtyard of the nearby library. I took with me my new book, The Force of Spirit, by Scott Russell Sanders. For a while I sat by the fountain and watched the sparrows landing at its waterfall edge flinging water around. A five year old girl ran round and round, repeatedly chasing them away. Her mother and I smiled at each other across the pool, enjoying the girl's mischief and the birds' persistence.

After a while, a little more composed, I moved to sit by myself in the sun to read. The first chapter begins: "My wife's father is dying, and I can think of little else, because I love him and I love my wife." I had come to this pretty place with its fountain and sculpture and garden to find some peace from my roiling thoughts and emotions, and there in the book I had chosen for a companion was the very thing I did not want to think about. As so often happens (if I allow myself to see things this way) I had been given the very thing I needed.

First including Sanders and his family, I found my tight circle of worry widening to hold others I know who are struggling with the challenges of illness and trouble. Sanders' skill at writing drew me in; and his love gave me courage to let my own love calm and comfort me. I did not stop thinking about what had brought me to the courtyard, but the anxiety receded and I discovered there were other just-as-true ways to be with the facts I knew.

Over and over this Summer I and people I know have been swept away by this sense that we are all a part of something larger than our individual selves, older and wider, deeper and more abiding. This sense has come from several things:

• learning that native prairie plants hold the good soil better than our current farming methods, and we could learn from how the prairie lives;
• being with gibbon families for a month in sanctuary in California;
• understanding that the skills that fathers pass on to sons for working wood and stone have not changed since people first began doing those things;
• the anguish of my South African friends at what is happening in neighboring Zimbabwe while their president is conciliatory for too long rather than critical of Zimbabwe's government;
• and remembering that somewhere in my yet-unopened boxes is a palm-sized stone I found outside Buffalo made of dozens of fossils of mucosa spifera brachiopod, a sea creature that lived 500 million years ago.

Each moment we partake of the vast mystery of living and dying, of living and adapting to changes beyond our control. We are part of helping each other remember this when, one by one, we forget or get lost beyond our ability to heal. As my teacher, Til Evans, put it, "We are surrounded by and embedded in a very great trust." In the remaining hot, hazy, slow days of Summer, may you find time to know how you, too, are held within this great trust; and that your love and anguish, your skill with building tools and drawing implements, even the gestures of your hands are joined with others across time and culture and species. Our small lives are joined with everything else. Amen.

With love,
Barbara Pescan