Divine Spark

This week, after nine years of nomadic nights and fund-raising, our local homeless shelter finally broke ground on its new, permanent building. Actually, the President of the Board just planted a maple tree in a redwood half-barrel, ceremoniously, but “breaking ground” is what they call it. Now remodeling can begin, changing this former church-and- office-building into a 54-bed shelter with kitchen, showers, laundry, and meeting rooms for guests as well as offices for the staff. The shelter is named Utah's Place, after folksinger U. Utah Phillips, who helped start it.

Also this week, another local champion of our homeless population, someone who has been feeding people hot and cold meals here for many years, died in a car crash on his way back from delivering food to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The irony of seven days being packed equally with happiness and sadness, and so closely revolving around the homeless, did not go unnoticed in our town.

Last night I sat on the sofa and watched the full moon rise. It comes up over my driveway at this time of year, huge and white between two little oaks. I wasn't thinking about homelessness, I was thinking about age. How I'd worked with an 80-year-old client that morning, and then had dinner with a 32-year-old friend. That I'd see my oldest student the next day, who's 95, and am slated to give driving lessons to a 15-year-old I adore. I was thinking, sort of distractedly while counting crochet stitches, how much I treasure everyone I know and how encircled I feel by people of all ages — somehow, at 57, in the right place.. I don't usually sit around thinking things like this, and it suddenly turned into something large and profound. I felt more and more quiet and amazed, grateful, lucky, the moon lifting into the sky, my heart full of love.

When I heard Tomas had died on the road, one of my thoughts was, “That could so easily be me.” I'm always off in a car alone, heading for Mt. Lassen, or southern Utah. That's what it would be like if I hit black ice and went off a cliff: people finding out over a couple of days and telling each other, shocked, disbelieving. Probably I will leave about the same-sized hole in this town that Tomas did. But I also felt a wild jolt of gladness that I'm not dead yet. It wasn't me this time.

Gratitude and grace spread all through me and out into the living room. I'm glad I have a home, with heat and light and running water. I'm glad I went to the ceremony at Utah's Place, even though I was horribly late. I'm grateful for eyes to see the moon, and that I took the time to find out this one's name: it's the Worm Moon.

I'm so glad the last time I saw Tomas on the sidewalk, I smiled at him and he smiled back.