What do we pack?

 An older woman told a pastor friend of mine recently that she was going blind. She seemed amazingly obliging about the news. Having given herself over to what would come, she was working on preparing herself for the change. "I guess I am going to have to memorize my favorite portions of the Bible," she told him.

"Packing," I told my friend. "She was packing up the things she would need for this move to a new place in her life." 

What a wise and gentle woman. Without fanfare, without fuss, she was taking stock of what this change would require her to leave behind, and what she could and should take along to manage it.

We all face these "moves" at various times in our lives, most of the time when we are alone. Some of these are more modest, like traveling by ourselves or giving a book report before 40 fifth-grade critics. Others are big, like surgery or taking a new job that takes us hundreds of miles from home. 

What we pack to help us live in the move is determined by what we have stored up over the years. These are different gifts than the coping skills we employ to help us get past a transition. These are, instead, what makes the essence of us: the teachings, the voices, the visions, the ever-constant sense of belonging that bury themselves deep inside, clinging to our innards and our spirit so that it becomes impossible to separate self from luggage.

And then, when we move, as eventually we all must, we must exercise the art of packing.

In between, in preparation, as we live the hours and days of our lives in the more secure places of here and now, we should be storing up the lessons and learnings, the moments and memories that pile upon us, as much as we can. I am, by nature, not a pack rat. Indeed, straightening closets, discarding things and making empty space brings me great joy.

But there, in my spiritual attic (which I seem to  enter more easily these days, prodded by a gentle tug of the attic door's dangling cord of scents and sights and sounds), it seems I can never get enough.

So I am trying harder, eager to hold fast to the visions around me: of a tiny white pine nestled improbably in a nook of a gnarled old dogwood; and the different shades of green of the tulip poplars in April and August; and our neighbors' glen on a summer's night flashing endlessly, silently, with battalions of lightning bugs charging up 100 foot trees. And a thousand more memories of loved ones' laughter, stories, lessons, and wisdom.

These - and others - are things I will store away in the attic, ready to be packed and taken with me when times get hard; when winter winds blow; and when the next step is mine to take alone.