They paced the house in circles, here and there a moan escaping pouting lips. The weight of their "we are so bored" words started pulling at me in all the wrong places. It was later in the afternoon after a day already spent mostly outside at the pool, in the garden yard. I was tired and out of sorts. Like a smoke break, I wanted a mama break - just ten minutes or so of nothingness and deep inhaling and exhaling; solitude without the smoke.
I handed each of them a perfectly ripe nectarine and sent them outside. I, too, took a nectarine from the bowl and perched on the porch in the shade, watching them a bit further away in the grass under the tree. They were giggling. Sweet juice ran down my arm. They took slow bites and swooshed mosquitoes away, blades of green grass stuck to their summer-tan limbs. They were in their own world, oblivious that I had ever even followed them outside to eat up my own suggestion.
We need this time together to strip our lives down bare, where quiet and bored mingle in their very own reverie, always there and ready for us to arrive. I watch as Sully hands Theo his nectarine pit. Theo beams and heads off searching for a pocket of dirt to dig with his bare hands which he will slip the pits in and cover back up. He'll continue to check his little mound of earth each day, hopefully that a baby tree will appear. Sully falls back into the grass and spends a good deal of time staring at the sky. I watch them. I always watch them and in return little shoots of pure love shoot up and out of the mound that is my heart. In this boredom we are quiet enough. We are enough.
If you popped in and read my last post, I owe you an apology. I deleted it later the same day as I posted it. After trying to edit my words three times, I just could not find the right language to match what I was feeling. Finally I deleted it with a silent I am sorry.
What I can say is that sometimes we have to clean out and reorganize the heart to make space for now and ahead. And sometimes it is only in silence and boredom where we can hear the changing of the heart, to pay attention there and invite the quietude in.
There in the porch shade and the tree shade, the pacing stops and the decluttering begins.
