An Old Rusty Pail

This story was sent to me by a friend.  The author is unknown.  If you know it's origins, please let me know so I can give proper credit.  In the mean time, let us find joy in the telling.

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.  We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out-patients at the clinic.

  One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man.  "Why, he's hardly taller than my 8-year-old," I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body.  The appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw.

  Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening.  I've come to see if you've a room for just one night.  I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus 'til morning."

  He told me he'd been hunting for a room since noon but with no success, no one seemed to have a room.  "I guess it's my face .... I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments ..."

  For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: "I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch.  My bus leaves early in the morning."

  I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch.  I went inside and finished getting supper.  When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us.  "No, thank you I have plenty."  And he held up a brown paper bag.

  When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes.  It didn't take a long time to see that this old man had an over sized heart crowded into that tiny body.  He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her 5 children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.

  He didn't tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was preface with a thanks to God for a blessing.  He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer.  He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going...

  At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children's room for him.  When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch.

  He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as

if asking a great favor, he said, "Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment?  I won't put you out a bit.  I can sleep fine in a chair."  He paused a moment and then added, "Your children made me feel at home.  Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't seem to mind."

   I told him he was welcome to come again.  And, on his next trip, he arrived a little after 7 in the morning.  As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen!  He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they'd be nice and fresh.  I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. And I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.

  In the years he came to stay overnight with us, there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.

  Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed.  Knowing that he must walk 3 miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly precious.

  When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning.

  "Did you keep that awful looking man last night?  I turned him away!  You can lose roomers by putting up such people!"

  Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice.  But, oh!, if only they could have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear.

  I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.

  Recently I was visiting a friend, who has a greenhouse, as she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms.  But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket.  I thought to myself, "If this were my plant, I'd put it in the loveliest container I had!"

  My friend changed my mind.  "I ran short of pots," she explained, "and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn't mind starting out in this old pail.  It's just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden."

  She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven.

  "Here's an especially beautiful one," God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman.  "He won't mind starting in this small body."

  All this happened long ago - and now, in God's garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.

 The LORD does not look at the things man looks at.  Man looks at the
outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7b)

Love Is Not an Emotion!

Recently I read of a courageous mother who fought to protect her children. As she was getting in the car, a man attempted to carjack her car. With a gun at her head, he had demanded she get out of the car. Because her children were in the car, she said NO! The man was surprised. Fear appeared to have no effect on this mother. 

A fight ensued and judging from his later mug shot, the intruder looked the worse for the encounter. I suspect the man felt safer in the custody of the police. For the mother, it was never an issue of being afraid or of giving up the car. Her children were her only concerned.

This reminded me of another news event that I heard took place in India a few years ago. A train had struck and killed a baby elephant. The mother elephant then proceeded to derailed and demolished the engine of the train. It was later determined that the engine could not be repaired.

For me, both of these stories reflect an outward expression of an inner truth. That love is the most essential universal law on earth. We are growing and maturing and now on the verge of discovering that our essential nature is in reality the celebration of love. Life is love and love is life and we will not be separated from either.

The universe is benevolent and works for our greater good. If we have forgotten that or would argue with that then we need to change our daily practice for this to seep into our lives. There is an orchestrated harmony that can be seen here upon the earth, up in the skies, and out in the cosmos of the stars. We are surrounded in every moment of time by an infinite power of goodness. This is what permeates and constitutes our being.

“All life is born in the waters of love, which are absorbed into our being and lived through our heart.  

Love is not an emotion. It is our complete state of being human. There is no wall love cannot tear down, no hate which love cannot imbue with light, no obstacle love cannot overcome. 

If we have been miserly with love, self absorbed, we missed the very essence of who we are. When we express love, it brings us the solutions to all problems, the warmth and embrace and resolve of all things. When we feel anger, we must sit in the self and observe this anger. All things eventually dissolve if we remain aware.”   Maya Tiwari 

I believe this understanding of love is not learned, it is remembered. By sitting in the stillness of the morning and watching the day unfold, or observing the sun as it sets at night and smelling the scents of the flowers released at dusk is to be reminded that goodness is our inheritance.

Too often, too much of our day is filled with distractions that keep us from this divine memory. May we find clarity of thought in the stillness of this moment in time. 

Help us to remember, not to forget, that we are God’s best idea and cannot be separated from that Love.  It is who we are.  And at times, we have others, who by example, remind us of this truth.  And I know of one wannabe thief who had a chance to learn that very lesson.

OUR DAILY PRACTICE

As I sat early this morning on my back patio, studying Ayurveda, I noticed our neighbor across the fence hanging out her laundry. What makes this unusual, is that my homeowners association has banned clotheslines. 

My neighbor is in another association and can hang out her clothes to dry. She lives in a very large home and can easily afford a dryer. However, she chooses to dry her clothes outside. 

Question! Have you ever slept in sheets on a bed that were dried on a clothes line? It is glorious! I am jealous of my neighbor! It brings memories of my mother hanging clothes and my sleeping in clean sheets from outside.

Today, we use an electronic dryer with a motherboard that cost $1000. How have we become so disconnected to mother Earth? For the sake of convenience, we are losing our connection to this present moment.

The earth is a macrocosm and we are a microcosm made up of the same components. Those are earth, water, fire, air, and space. The food we eat is composed of those five elements. The plants we raise use these five elements in various degrees. I have a shamrock plant in a pot that sat on the patio. The daily wind was stressing it. It was getting too much of ‘air’ from the five components. So we moved it to the bathroom near a window. In one week it bloomed and blossomed beautiful white flowers! The five components were back in balance.

Like the plants we raise and the food we eat, we also require a certain balance for our Constitution. Our bodies are also made up of these five elements. And through our relationship with the earth we can find healing.

We need to realize that health is a state of living in harmony with nature as a whole and with our own basic natures. We resonate with the world because we were formed from nature. And it will be nature that heals us when we become ill.

And the only way to live in harmony with the cosmos is to do what is to be done in the present. Or so explains Maja Tiwari in her book THE PATH OF PRACTICE.

So as I watched my neighbor this morning hang up her clothes to dry with the fire of the sun and the air of the wind, I knew I was watching someone connecting with nature and this moment in time.

“By finding spiritual accord in our daily routines, we can find this peace elsewhere and everywhere. If we cannot find the harmony in our everyday actions, we will not find it anywhere else.”             Maja Tiwari