In the sweet meantime

"Never let an opportunity to see anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am realizing, these days, that I am distressingly dependent on my phone.  Or, that is, the small computer in my pocket which also makes phone calls.  My new digs does not have internet, so my phone becomes my connection to email, social media, people, networks, support, sanity... I check in with my fiance via text, I confirm a meeting with my grandmother via phone, I talk with my mother through email, I giggle at a picture of my niece and nephew on facebook.  Without my phone, I am truly disconnected, marooned out on the prairie from those I love.  (which I know is not totally true, but a lot rides on such a small device)

And I admit these days I have become a fiddler.  Always checking and rechecking.  Any small blip is a connection with those who feel far away.  This is a sobering confession I make in hopes for some accountability-- I want so badly to be someone who is "all there", very present with the people and in the places which I find myself.  Instead of fiddling with the buttons and sending small half-wishes to be elsewhere.  And maybe the fiddling is the attempt to be "all there"-- in all the theres which call me: there, and over there, and near there, and somewhere there... But they compete hopelessly with my very real, here.

I was waiting the other day.  Really waiting.  Not fiddling (I had to stop myself in the process), but sitting and being in anticipation for my coming ride.  While waiting, I looked and saw.  A chorus of robins making their way from one tree to the other across the street.  I watched them swing back and forth like watching a airborne tennis match.  I wondered if in our small computers we have lost the capacity to wait, and to have our waiting be its fullest possible.  I waited and found delight in the aerial parade of birds, with actual tweets. They were the small blessing of that "there" of which I missed most of the blessing; for even waiting time has its fullness.