Susanna

Nobody in the hospital could tell the age of the old woman who was called Susanna.
I knew she spoke some English and that she was an immigrant out of a little country trampled by armies. Because she had no visitors I would stop by to see her but she was always sleeping. All I could do was to get out her comb and carefully untangle the tangles in her hair. One day I was beside her when she woke up opening small dark eyes of a surprising clearness. She looked at me and said, "You want to know the truth?" I answered yes. She said, "It's something that my mother told me. There's not a single inch of our whole body that the Lord does not love." Then she went back to sleep.

'Susanna' by Anne Porter

One of the hard things to accept about life in the woods is the tenuous thread by which living things within it cling to life. Never does that appear more precarious than in springtime when the monumental instinct to carry on procreation erupts across all the natural kingdoms and mistakes or misjudgments can be fatal. The laws of nature are built on survival of the fittest. Compassion only exists in its primitive state where the weak, by way of a fierce mercy, fall by the wayside. We have been able to provide more security for our lives than the creatures in the woods, but there are still times all of us find ourselves swept into the ditch on the side of the road feeling abandoned, helpless and left for dead. What is different is when we find ourselves in that desolate place, we have available to us the grace of compassion.

There are many stories of people who with dramatic, larger than life acts, raise themselves up beyond anything we could imagine ourselves doing. They may inspire us but to be truthful, the grist of our own individual life is formed day by day from our own joys and heartaches and beliefs about ourselves. Where the rubber meets the road for most of us, is not on a grand scale but right here on our own pot holed asphalt. There in our relationships, our jobs, finances and heart wrenching moments the truest but most often forgotten ally we have, is compassion for ourselves. In our forsaken places where we struggle and gasp, it asks us to reach through our judgments about the events at hand—who is to blame or at fault or made a terrible mistake—and to replace it with clemency. It asks us to open the prison of guilt and shame and finger pointing we have placed ourselves in and to hush the wailing voices of our pain and anger that continue only for their own sake. If we choose to listen, we can create the opportunity to get up out of the wreckage we have made and walk away with insight and understanding. Instead of draining ourselves off into a life in the ditches, we choose our capacity to deepen our awareness, to learn and change how we go about traveling down the road of our lives. We bless not only the frailty of all that we are but also our potential to create all we can become. We get up out the ditch and go on our way.