In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes shares folk tales resonant with power.

One such tale, shared in a chapter about women’s need to cherish and steward the juices of creativity, she speaks of the need to sit in the lap of a trusted other in order to be rocked into a sense of rest and re-creation.  Sometimes what is needed is the “there, there, there” of tending and hold.

It has been such a time for me, these days of vacation.  I have felt the “there, there, there” of embrace from a lake whose smell is life for me, from echoing loon call, from unstructured days and from time spent with clan people who make my heart stretch with almost unbearable gratitude.

Books have been inhaled, stars admired, cribbage and monopoly games have been won and lost (when did my children become such consummate capitalists?!) and I have felt the stirrings of a desire to re-engage with the considerable richness that is my vocational life.

But oh, I want to remember the sense of Holy holding when the temptation to book my life crazy takes hold.

Our lives, each of our lives, are held in the embrace of the holding “there, there, there”.  Holy shelter is not finite nor bound by vacation calendars or locale.  The arms of grace are longing to enfold and bless in ways that lead us to co-creation of the good, the healing, the deep-breath-being that is mindfulness.

No matter where we believe ourselves to be: stuck in traffic, in despair, in the sometimes wrench that is reading the newspapers.  No matter.  We have but to breathe and remember the expansive lap of grace that holds us, pats us, stills us, enlivens us, and asks us to do no more than we humanly can; God being our guide, our witness, our shelter, our lap.

Remind me in a week that this is so.