ALL WILL BE WELL

Here I am at the Portland airport thinking of Julian of Norwich. It turned out that both Liz and I were reading books about her while I was in Burnsville over Easter. Julian and prayer shawls. That is: both reading Julian, both making prayer shawls. Something happens in the spaces between thinking. Solitude and knitting in the presence of a beloved person both create that atmosphere. When I left her today she said, "who will I talk to?" Steve chimed in immediately saying she could talk to him. "You play solitaire," she chimed right back. "YOU knit," he teased.

We did knit almost more than we talked while Krista knit, too, and baby David Keegan played on the floor or in one of those contraptions with bells and whistles in which mommas put babies these days. Krista made hand knit bunnies, mittens for her sister-in-law, an intricate cabled scarf--and Liz and I prayed away at shawls. The larger the space between stitches, the more lacy the shawl. And right now I'm thinking--also the more space to be idle, to let the feelings through, to feel the solitude, to be quiet and hear the word of life which is after all divine.

And so we heard each other through the spaces we knit of silences, and they were lacy spaces, and we marveled at how close we found outselves to be. So I suppose this is why she said "But who will I talk to?" when we hardly talked at all.

This is what is so well about all that is well. Those spaces through which we reach out to one another with a silence that transcends any word we can hear with minds or ears, a stillness of spaciousness that tells us all we need to know about how we all shall be well.