“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”
~The Rolling Stones

At a meeting this past week I shared what is perhaps an oddity about me that I realized later might be best kept secret. I am not even sure how the subject came up but I told the group about how I actually enjoy going to a store where they are out of whatever it is I have come to purchase. This happens to me with regularity while shopping at the small, though wonderful, grocery store, Trader Joe’s. On more than one occasion I have gone shopping with certain items on my list only to find one of them ‘temporarily out of stock.’ The first time it happened I was somewhat shocked. “You mean I can’t always have what I want?”, I thought but didn’t say to the young store worker. “You mean there isn’t more stashed someplace just waiting for me to come buy it?”

I think one of the reasons that this inability to have my wants met gives me such a good feeling is that, in some ways, it connects me with a time gone by. A time when stores were smaller and there weren’t immense amounts of storage space where extras were kept. A time when you had maybe only one choice of a particular item, at the most a couple of any one thing. A time when merchants stocked shelves with items that didn’t have a shelf life(always a troubling thought for me.) When things could spoil if they sat there too long.

Another reason I find joy in ‘out of stock’ is that it in some way connects me with how the majority of the rest of the world lives. In small towns and remote areas around the world people have a certain self sufficiency that finds its home in the fact that not all things are available at all times. In this country, this is the bedrock of the slow food movement. Does It really make sense that we might be able to have strawberries in January in Minnesota? Living with the rhythm of the seasons means that at some point of the year something will be out of stock.

I recognize that these words come from a place of great privilege. The fact that I can even find a sense of pleasure from not being able to have what I want proves I also have had very little experience with not having what I need. Nearly every day I meet someone who would give anything to have what I most assuredly take for granted. Perhaps in some odd way this ‘out of stock’ experience connects me with these dear ones as well. Whether yes or no, I am humbled by being in their presence and often offer a prayer for their deepest needs, maybe even a chance at a want or two.

In the grand scheme of things finding a particular item at the store out of stock is small potatoes, so to speak. But I am thankful for the opportunity it provides, to reflect on all I do have, to connect with the experience of the wider world, and to count my blessings. Over and over again.

On these amazing summer days, much is ‘in stock’. May this weekend find you celebrating the gifts of this season, one which brings some of nature’s finest beauty and plentiful bounty. And may you,too, find occasion to count your own blessings.

“To imagine is not simply to see what does not exist or what one wants to exist. It is also a profound act of creativity to see what is.”
~Susan Griffin

At a writing workshop I took a few weeks ago, the teacher read this quote of Susan Griffin. I jotted it down in a notebook I was using along with several others that needed more pondering time than the class allowed. Yesterday I was reading through my notes from the class and came upon these words again. Their pull for me lies with a long held belief that each of us is born with everything we need to make the life to which we are called. From the time we were placed within our parent’s arms, we were ‘wired’ in particular ways that are unique to us. Anyone who is a parent can attest to raising individual children in the same environment, setting the same boundaries and rules, dishing out an equal amount of love, only to be amazed at how unique and different each child becomes. Many times we can see it from that first glimmer of personality, with the infant’s first cry or smile. Some of us battle at the world with clenched fists while others move through their lives in relative calm and ease. There are certainly environmental factors that come into play, ways we are wounded, ways we come to know success, that add to who we are. But there seems to be, I believe, a uniqueness to each of us that is seeded from our beginnings.

Griffin’s words on imagination captured my attention also because they seem to speak to the juggernaut the political leaders of Minnesota have created for themselves, and thereby, for all of us as our government has shut down. Both ‘sides’, as they want to describe themselves, could use a good dose of imagination to find ways to work together for the common good of all people. The imagination is a powerful thing. It is what helps us create the stories by which we give meaning to our lives. It is the tool that brings about all great inventions and cures. Imagination brings us the gifts of art, music, dance, poetry, film and plays. It also is what helps us dream a future. The imagination is what helps us give language to our experience of the Holy that moves through our lives is ways that are felt but not seen.

In order to bridge this enormous chasm our leaders have created, there is a need to see not only what does exist and what does not exist within each person from diverse viewpoints, but what actually is present within each. Perhaps it is Pollyanna of me to think that each elected leader wants for all children what they want for their own children…. to have adequate food, safe places to live, health care when they need it and schools that will prepare them well for their future. I can’t help but believe that they also want for their own parents what every one else does…..enough resources to live comfortably without fear, the health care they need as they age, safe places in which to live out their final years, neighborhoods in which they feel at home. Each person, no matter what side of the aisle, has within them what they need to come to the table, to employ their imagination, to solve this situation that is causing pain and anguish to so many.

It has been my experience that it is difficult to let one’s imagination work while at the same time clenching fists or shouting loudly. It is also nearly impossible to enter imagination’s playground while holding too tightly to a need to be in control. After all, the gift of imagination is that it takes us places we had not expected, weaving what is visible and invisible, what was and what can be, with all the realities of what already exists. Sometimes, almost always, it begs for compromise, for risk, for compassion, and above all, a deep, deep listening. Listening to others and to the whisper of the Holy breathing through all.

And so, dear leaders of Minnesota, my prayer for you all is the ability to lean, gently lean into the soft body of imagination, to allow the deepest part of you to listen to your brothers and sisters with whom you share this courageous task, to see with the eyes of your heart, not only your children or your parents, but all the young and old ones who are counting on your glorious imagination. And in it all that you may hold tenderly what has been and what is yet to be with the wisdom that was planted within you.

We are all counting on you.

This morning I began the ritual of ‘putting up’. Putting up was a term I remember hearing from my childhood. Women dressed in aprons stood sentry in hot, humid kitchens to can or freeze summer’s fruits and vegetables. They were ‘putting up’ the gifts of warm weather for the colder weather that was inevitable. My southern Ohio childhood did bring a winter of sorts but nothing like the Minnesota cold I have come to know as a transplant. The joy that a jar of strawberry jam or cling peaches can bring in the bleakness of January is not to be under estimated.

This particular day was all about strawberries. Early this morning,my husband and I joined people of all ages as we picked some of the final strawberries of the season. The red, juicy berries are now cleaned and bagged and have found a home in our freezer until the right moment when I will pull them out to bring color and sweetness to a cold winter day. These gifts of June will create an experience of time travel in which, not only will the berries be enjoyed, but the also a retelling of the story the other pickers. The Hmong women covered head to toe in a variety of prints to protect them from the sun. The lone man in the yellow muscle shirt who looked like he should be riding a Harley instead of picking strawberries. The older gentleman,none too pleased with what he thought were slim pickin’ for berries, who shared his story of being a retired church organist who once made his home in Stockholm, Wisconsin. Will it be possible to eat the berries in January without remembering those with whom we began our ‘putting up’?

As I think about it these last few days for me have all been about putting up. I have spent the last several days at the family cabin in northern Wisconsin to celebrate the 4th of July. It has been a tradition for more than 20 years and the days have, over the years, been made up of many configurations of people.Some of us have remained constant. Our children have brought different friends over the years and this year are old enough to not need that extra playmate to keep them happy. A book, a boat, the lake itself seems to suffice. The children of the lake neighbors have now grown, married and have children of their own. Each year is a little different but still very much the same. The joy of arrival. The simplicity of cabin life. Boat rides. Late night dinners. The July 4th flea market where there is never anything new. (But, truth be told, we wouldn’t have it any other way.) The small town parade with the fire engines, local camp floats, and the same clown as every year.

In a sense, when many of us gather together every summer in whatever we have created as traditions, we mentally ‘put up’ morsels of memory for the coming winter times in our lives, those times which can seem cold and unkind. Along with the harvest of our gardens, summer is also about storing up stories and images to reflect on and warm us in the winters that will surely come. In the scriptures Jesus actually warns against storing up things on earth where ‘moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal’. Instead he encourages us to ‘store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’

As I read that scripture, I believe the putting up of the gifts of Creation to be a heavenly treasure, one that fills us with awe and connection to the Creator who breathed us into being and promised to feed us from the Earth. With each jar of brilliant red berries and each long, lovely green bean we once again renew our covenant to be caretakers of the Earth. With each experience of a sun kissed morning or the sound of children’s laughter wafting over the lake, we are reminded of the awesome blessing that is summer Sabbath. As the loon calls hauntingly and the eagle dips into clear, shining waters, we can recommit to glimpsing heaven on earth which is, after all, a part of our life’s work. The configuration of the people may change but much will always stay the same. It is the way of life.

I am thankful for all that has been ‘put up’ over the last few days. These gifts of summer will go a long way on a frigid, February night. And so they should.

What are the gifts of summer you will be putting up?

Blessed be.