A Tidal Wave of Light

The anniversary of the shooting at our beloved Covenant School is a mere nine days away. Once the weather starts to get nice there is a rising dread that contradicts the birth of Spring. I hate this, this rise of darkness when the natural world is showing off its beauty after the barrenness of winter. At the same time, living with contradiction of feeling and thought, even experience, has been something I’m learning to be open to in adulthood. The concept of swirling tension between what is happy and what is sad, what is good and what is bad, what is hopeful and what produces fear, has mostly become a reality for me, a jumble of all of these things at once. I can be completely content in the grey, but I’m also quite tired in the grey.

Last Fall, I went to a source point therapist who is trained to work on the body with an awareness of energy and release that may need to take place in certain parts of the body. The work can feel like an elusive concept, but after years of trying methods to overcome some specific intense anxiety, I felt like working with my body could help integrate some of my seemingly unmovable blocks. The therapist has a set up much like a massage therapist and there is some massage involved, but the point is to read the room, the body in its different parts, and the energy being produced to pin point where potential tension is held. It’s a practice to release expectation and let the body react and respond just as it needs to.

My imagination has been quite limited most of my life. My childhood games were ones of order; dressing dolls, putting them in family groups, organizing things by color, drawing inside the lines. Pretend play felt uncomfortable to do on my own, but I could generally rely on a sibling to come up with something that I could join in with. I’m too practical for my own good, a realist. Pets and flowers and themes and hugs have been too fru fru for my liking, only in the past five years or so have I been softening up to such outlandish things (seriously, who needs hugs? Well, it turns out I do, but I denied it for a VERY long time) J

Now, let’s put trapped, ridged Sonnie to the back of our minds. I was lying on the therapist’s table and almost immediately my mind was allowed to slip away, away from what was happening in the moment, away from the weight my body was carrying. Suddenly I found myself in the church basement where the students and staff were held after the shooting, waiting for the reunification process to complete with the parents staged upstairs right above us. The chaos was settling down after hours at a heightened state. The students were dismissed youngest to oldest and maybe half of the students remained. I was in overdrive up until this point. As a member of the staff (not faculty), I was helping teachers take kids to the bathroom, helping kids get snacks, helping kids by rubbing backs and looking into their precious faces. The room was now quieting and I went to my own daughter, my eight-year-old baby, and scooped her up into my lap. We sat on the floor and rocked and rocked together. This scene was exactly how things had been on that terrible day.

As the memories flooded in, my girl and I rocking together on the floor, the reality of the story took a turn when I then got a little peck on my knee. I looked down to see the fuzziest, yellowest, kindest looking creature there ever was. It was a baby duck. I tapped my girl and told her to look! The baby duck was curiously looking at us, head cocked, eyes interested in our tears. Suddenly there were a couple more in the room. The other people started noticing. We were all becoming a little more animated, amused by the little creatures. And then, a rush of millions of tiny baby ducks came down the stairs like an ocean wave and they picked us up and carried us upstairs where they scooped up the parents and the police officers and the firefighters. We all came busting out of the church doors. The ducks were incredibly soft, we were all smiling, terror erased from each face. We were looking at each other in amazement. As we flooded onto Hillsboro Road, we all started laughing and screaming because the six victims were there, also scooped up by ducks, also comforted and cared for and free. Our tidal wave of yellow was scooping up everyone in its path, everyone in Nashville, everyone everywhere and it was the most glorious comforting, outlandish picture of hope I had experienced in a very long time.

And as the world continues to spin, and wars blaze on, and politics roar, and planes crash, and natural disasters devastate, and anniversaries of shootings loom in the midst of beautiful Spring, I keep thinking about these baby ducks. I think about baby ducks rushing into the oval office. Then I think about them rushing into Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, every place marked by the damning realities of war. I think about them rushing in to a situation of abuse. I think about them rushing in to defend and comfort in the midst of tornadoes and floods and fires. And the peace these thoughts bring, the hope that is possible in the worst human experiences is suddenly alive. And I don’t know what to do or how to be most of the time, but man, the power of seeing each and every human carried on the backs of millions of baby ducks, laughing in amazement at the ridiculous, miraculous nature of it all helps keep me going sometimes. This moment of intense imagination has given me a picture that may likely bring me peace my entire lifetime and I am grateful to have been able to let go, to allow such a whimsical storyline to unfold.

The light I needed came rushing in as a baby duck.