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Tonight I sit here with so much longing. 

First, I long for my son to feel better.  I write this blog post next to a little feverish boy who has just fallen asleep in my arms.  His cries of discomfort cut through to my soul and I would do anything to soothe him right now. 

I have done the cool towel on the body thing and have finally managed to get some ibuprofen in him.  For now, I watch and wait to see how he does.  I have a feeling I will be keeping him home from school tomorrow and missing a day of work when I have no sick or vacation days to spare.  But that is not right now, and I will deal with it when I have to.

Right now I am listening to Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech, and think, “this is a voice I could listen to for the next eight years.”  There is a sparkling anticipation in the air, throughout the country, it seems.  It feels like the night before something new is going to be born.  Here I am, praying myself silly that tomorrow night at this time, we will be celebrating the Obama presidency. 

Who would have thought that anyone in the political realm could inspire hope in this ruthless political cynic?

Obama’s voice exhorts me to hope.  He is a good hope-monger and I think that maybe under his leadership we can just begin to repair the horrendous damage of the last eight years.  Maybe eight years from now, I will no longer be ashamed to be an American when I travel abroad. 

Do I dare to hope?  I have written before about how terrifying hope is.  Yet there is a struggle in me, between the dreamer and the one who sees the futility of living in past or future, and knows that all we have is this moment. 

Yet in the moment, right now I am experiencing longing for so many things that have not yet occurred.  I long for my son to be all better, now.  I long for a new president who inspires me. 

“Yes, we can repair this world,” says Barack Obama.

I find myself crying.  I listened to this speech in January when he first made it but tonight, it hits me differently, his words pierce their way into this heart.  My heart is a tender piece of flesh, softened as it is by new (love?  is it love?) for Man on the Horizon and worry for my son and worry for this country and worry for the world, a fierce concern that dissolves into tears as I type this, blurring the words before my eyes.  As a mother, I worry like I’ve never worried before, and I love like I’ve never loved before.  It can be overwhelming how deeply I feel it all.  And of course I want to run away - to send an email, to plug into my Ipod, to read something, to talk about it on the phone…

But then, I remember how Pema Chodron talks about spiritual practice as learning to stay. 

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves as we are that meditation becomes a transformative process. The pith instruction is, Stay. . . stay. . . just stay. 

 

Oh, how hard it is to stay.  Everything seems to pull me forward into the future right now and in the face of all this, I come back to right now.  The sweat that breaks on my son’s brow, the tears that dry on my cheeks, my head full of jumbled thoughts, my head resting on the pillow, my son’s hot little body touching me, my longing, my fear, the hope that I dare not feel, the sheer vulnerability of being so very fragile, so very human.  So very, blessedly, alive in this moment.