What must be sacrificed, and it will fee like a sacrifice, is the attachment and the strange satisfaction that problem-solving gives us. Don’t you feel good when you’ve solved problems at the end of the day? We say to ourselves, “I’m an effective, productive, efficient human being. I’ve earned my right to existence today because I’ve solved ten problems.” I do want us to solve problems; certainly there are plenty out there to solve. But not too quickly. We mustn’t lead with our judgments and fears. We shouldn’t lead with our need to fix and solve problems. This is the agenda-filled calculating mind that cannot see things through God’s eyes. We must not get rid of the anxiety until we have learned what it wants to teach us. -Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

Wait. Give up attachment to problem-solving? That is more than a challenging concept for me and yet paradoxically I find something deeply resonant about this quote. Here is what it says to me: Problem solving is good, needed – but don’t lead into it with judgements and fears. Don’t lead with the (ego-driven) need to fix and solve the problems. Don’t lead with a calculating agenda because often, this kind of agenda is actually calculated to deal with an underlying anxiety, not the actual problem. As a result, this underlying anxiety ends up driving the agenda, (that was created to squelch the anxiety) like a strange circular pattern of negative driving the negative. When confronted with anxiety, don’t use an essentially fear and judgement driven plan to fix, solve, and produce, in a desperate attempt to build and maintain your ego-structure, your concept of self, because this is all an effort to flush the anxiety away – but instead, we just end up encasing it in our concept of self. We just build better walls around it, containing it better, imprisoning and silencing it when maybe it has something to teach us about who and where we really are.

Up, up, up we go, and then we go down. It’s all part of the deal.

If we could only put our fear-driven calculating agendas aside and trust the process.

We are a people in mourning but not in despair: over-come with grief but devoid of self-pity; lamenting disaster, recollecting sins, self-impeaching. Mourning is repentance.

We are a people in mourning that calls for mending.

Such deep sorrow is cleansing. It is a non-deliberate way of expanding compassion, of understanding the non-finality of current history. Lamentation leaves behind an echo in all our laughing. Yet that deep sorrow is also experienced as a prelude to redemption.

-Abraham Heschel

“…the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.”

“The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.”

-Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion”

Even though we vary in age, gender and ability and most of us don’t know each other outside of class – it’s a weekly liturgy of body and breath that we share. An hour and a half of breathing and scripted movement.

Last night a blind woman, whom I’d seen in the practice once before, came to class.  She put her mat on the floor, across from mine and next to a new student. She began the series, joining into the liturgy of body and breath.  It was new to her, and she struggled to remember the poses.  The student next to her was also unfamiliar with the series, and like the blind woman struggled to remember the poses, but could watch the other more familiar students if she lost her way.  The instructor helped the blind woman as she could, making her way among the other students in the room.  A few minutes passed, and my concentration was gently broken by whispers surfacing through the sounds of breathing. I glanced across the room.  Standing upright, with one leg at a right angle and the other stretched out behind her, the blind woman was in Utthita Parsvakonasana, unsure about the placement of her limbs.  The new student next to her had stopped her practice to whisper to the blind woman;

“Move your hand up, closer to your leg.  That’s good.  Now lean into your arm. Right, just like that. Reach your other arm up and over your head, stretch it way out – making a line from your ankle to your fingertips. Good. Now turn your head up, and look towards your hand.”

The blind woman followed the whispered directions of the fellow new student with flawless accuracy.

“Beautiful. Perfect.” -Said the new student to the blind woman.

And it was.

So, starting sometime in April, I’d begin to get calls to take in birds of many different species, shapes, sizes, ages and stages.  I’d concoct formulas to match their seed eating, insect eating or omnivorous nutritional needs and use little one-millimeter needle-less syringes to feed them every 2 hours during the day until they were old enough to eat on their own. (Fun Fact 2: when you specialize in mammal rehabilitation, you don’t get the nights off) I raised sparrows, purple finches, golden finches, robins, mourning doves, wrens, blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, whippoorwills, brown thrashers, northern flickers, blue jays, blue birds, and even once in a great while, (with a tiny little catheter tip on the end of a syringe) I’d raise a hummingbird. (Fun Fact 4: the formula I’d make for a hummingbird was part sugar-based, but also included protein – hummingbird parents feed their babies tiny insects).

I became the song bird rehab aficionado in a greater metropolitan area.

“What in the world do you have in your purse?!” (bag, box, pocket, etc.) was a on-going question as those around me would notice strange sounds coming from places that were normally strange-sound free in the days before the iphone.  Feeding schedules necessitated that I bring many of these birds with me wherever I was.  I had them (somewhat) secretly stashed away, but nevertheless with me at all times – at friend’s houses, the grocery store, in the mall, at church, on road trips, vacations and even the occasional canoe or kayak trip.  People who knew me in my days of bird-mothering will often remind me, “Remember that one time you had a bird in your….?” (purse, bag, box, pocket, lunch cooler, file cabinet drawer behind your desk in your classroom, etc.)  I was the bird lady.

And many, many birds I did raise from hatchling to fledgling until finally, released.  However, unlike with children and students and other groups in which you’re not supposed to acknowledge the fact you have favorites, I admit – I really bonded with one unique bird.

He was a solo hatchling crow named, not-so-creatively, Edgar, (Fun Fact 5: raising crows solo is a last-resort, they imprint on humans something fierce).  Edgar, with his lovely baby-blue eyes, (Fun Fact 6: crows have blue eyes until adulthood, then they turn black) would call me with a wide variety of different sounds.  He didn’t just want to be fed, he wanted my attention, even my affection. From an early age, he was mischievous and playful. (Fun Fact 7: american crows can count and solve problems at a toddler-ish level) Once Edgar could fly well enough, I’d bring him outside with me where he would cause all kinds of trouble.  Anything small and colorful, he’d pick up and fly away with – hiding it somewhere in the yard.  Once, I took my earrings out and set them on the deck and turned around to do something else. In seconds, Edgar had picked them up, and brought them to his cache.  I lost jewelry, clothes pins, hair-ties, small caps to this and that, pens, pencils, garden markers, even the electric fence insulators from our animal pastures if I happened to set them down and look away before I nailed them to the posts. Everything was fair game in Edgar’s world.

Edgar also introduced us to our neighbors, something we hadn’t gotten around to doing for an entire year. This was one of the most important implications of this intersection of bird and human life. He was a great link and conversation starter in our rural area with little neighborly proximity, where physical distance from house to house generally lends to people keeping to themselves.  I was in the habit of daily runs on our dirt roads and  Edgar was in the habit of flying along with me.  He would fly from telephone pole to telephone pole, following me on my entire run. I would talk to him as I ran, and he would chatter back.  What I didn’t know was that Edgar was also making a habit of flying this route without me, curious about the neighbors and uninhibited by the human concern that maybe they lived in a rural area because they wanted their privacy.

I found this out on one of our daily runs. Edgar flew on ahead of me a bit, and then behind some trees where a driveway was.  As I continued on to where he was, I heard a little girl, “Mom, Roger’s here again and he wants a snack!”  As I got closer I noticed that “Roger” was actually Edgar.  “You mean Edgar?” I ask. “I mean Roger,” replied the girl, “He likes cinnamon rolls.” I stopped to talk to the little girl and her mother a bit. We laughed about the tricks Edgar/Roger played on all of us and remarked about how crazy it was that it took a crow to introduce us to each other.  A week or so later, this same scene played out again – this time with a different neighbor.  Edgar/Roger played the same tricks on this neighbor, but went by the name of Ben.  “The man who used to live here was named Ben.” I was told, “He died several years ago. He was a great man, we thought this must be his spirit.”  We talked about Edgar and Ben and wondered why we, as neighbors, hadn’t met each other yet.  This scenario would repeat itself a few more times over the next few weeks with other neighbors I’d never met.  Each time, we’d share stories and laugh about Edgar’s tricks and then wonder out-loud why it took a bird to finally introduce us.

At some point, Edgar abandoned visiting human neighbors and joined with the other neighbor crows, (Fun Fact 8: a group of crows is called a ‘murder’).  By the end of the summer, a few had been making a visit to Edgar here and there, talking with him, maybe checking him out, maybe asking him where to get the cinnamon rolls, (Fun Fact 9: crows are omnivorous and eat whatever is available).  I could hear their back-and-forth chattering from inside the house as they perched in the red maple directly outside of a window.  He would leave with them on occasion, but would always return in the evenings.  Eventually, his evening returns became fewer and fewer until one day, he just never came back.

Edgar was one of my last wildlife rehabilitation projects, and undoubtedly my most memorable. Although I’d worked with birds as respectable as the robin, as beautiful as the blue bird and as unusual as the whippoorwill, (Fun Fact 10: the whippoorwill has a tiny beak but a huge mouth that gives one the impression it has a flip-top head, it’s crazy – trust me) and although many bird snobs might scoff at “rehabilitating” a crow, it was an intersection of nature and humanity that had important implications in our little microcosm of a social system known as ‘our neighborhood’.  Edgar left, but the connections he helped forge between us continued, mostly in small ways; a wave, a conversation, helping out with this or that.  Crows are naturally highly sociable animals, this was very much a part of Edgar’s nature – as it is with ours. However, with his playful uninhibited curiosity, he had a way – as the crow flies – of engaging with people above and beyond the physical or social boundaries that might tell the rest of us to look away, stand back, keep to ourselves. Edgar, in his ignorance of these boundaries, showed us they didn’t really exist – at least not as rigidly as we thought they did.  His natural drive to be sociable eventually called him to join the other crows, but in the process, in his mischievous innocence, Edgar reminded us of our own sociable natures, and of the delight in consequential interactions with neighbors.  -A smile, a wave, a shared story about the fond memory of a crow.

“There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.”

-RUMI, “A Community of the Spirit”

_____________________________________________________________________________

I was in a vessel, (somewhat like the cabin of a ship) with several other people.  From my seat I could see a small window to the outside. Outside of this portal, life was going on; people walking, talking, driving, working. The good kind of ordinary day, after ordinary day.  The others in the vessel with me were seated around a table, also talking, conversing with each other – just living together.  I join the conversation, and enjoy talking to all of these people who are all so different. -But soon I feel slight turbulence in the vessel and I look to the small window and see that the weather has taken a turn.  I know that the others with me can’t see this window from where they happen to be sitting, so I glance back at the people to see if they felt the turbulence as well. But no one seems to have noticed, and they continue on with their casual conversation.  The weather continues to get worse, as does the turbulence inside the vessel.  I scan the people in the room with me again, and still see no acknowledgment.  Soon, outside of us, the wind begins to take on hurricane proportions and the turbulence inside becomes accordingly frightening.  Once again, I look at the others with me. Now I can see fear in their eyes,  I can see that they are afraid.  But still, none acknowledge the increasing turbulence or the fear rising in each of them. Instead, they stop talking to each other and begin to make piles.  Piles devoid of any meaning.  Piles of nothing.  

Gather. Sort. Stack. Gather. Sort. Stack.  

Eyes down, no longer engaged with each other, they divert their fear-driven energy into something they can control – meaningless busywork.  I’m bothered, confused.  I know we need to address this fear. I know we all need to look up, to look at each other and acknowledge the fear – this collective-individual fear.  Very soon the raging winds outside turn to a wall of water that hits the vessel with a great force.  With the sudden shock of this impact, all of the piles are thrown to the ground, scattered in every direction – this great turbulence shatters the illusion of control in a single moment.  With nothing left to gather, nothing left to sort, everyone finally looks up and acknowledges the fear in themselves and in each other.  With this re-engagement – we see each other again, we acknowledge our fear together.  With collective tears we give up our illusions of control. Within this space of loss, of suffering together, of engagement through our grief — we are finally able to hope and cry out for for the end of the turbulence. We are finally able to come together for the beginning of something better.

______________________________________________________________________________

Shortly after this dream occurred, I began my 7th year of teaching and this sense of urgency would soon follow into my awake life.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be the last year I taught.  I, like so many others, would loose my job due to the ripples and waves of Great Recession.  Adding to the blow, my husband’s work was knocked out from underneath him within the same year.  In a moment, our livelihoods were gone, all of our plans and projections for the future washed away.  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Quickly shoved into disequilibrium, we did what every good American is taught to do; we tightened our belts and pulled up our bootstraps.  We gathered our energies, sorted our resources and stacked our options.  We came up with a new plan. And then another new plan. And then another new plan. We were optimistic that something would work. -If we just held on long enough, just worked hard enough, we would soon be back where we left off.  We continued to try to make our way back to where we were, looking for jobs in a quickly contracting job market, applying with the hundreds of other applicants.  We cut our budget as much as we could, living very near the poverty threshold, all with the assumption that things would turn around, we would be back where we were – we just needed to hold on and those promises of security would once again be in our hands. This, after all, is how it was supposed to go.

What we didn’t know, however, is that this turn of events would not only drain our savings, but eventually even our mental capacity to be resourceful. What we couldn’t, (or didn’t want to) see is that something had passed, something had ended. We just couldn’t acknowledge the death.  So we pushed back the growing fear, turning it instead towards things we could control.  All of our efforts to seemingly no avail.

It was early December two years in, and remarkably two perfect teaching positions appeared out of thin air.  I quickly applied and was called for a first interview, then a second.  This was nearly miraculous in the current economy and I was sure that one of these jobs would once again give us the security we’d lost.  This would change everything for us.  Then the first call came – they’d hired the other candidate. Discouraged, but left with one good potential job, I waited for the second call. The second call came on Christmas Eve of that year.  It was a very difficult decision, I was told, but they chose the other candidate.  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

It’s so hard to acknowledge death.

This news sent me into a period of deep disillusionment. My security was only an illusion – we only had control until we didn’t.  The promises my culture had sold me of “work hard and get ahead” could not be kept, not by our efforts or by the systems that we believed would support them.  Everything was up in the air – these were powerless ideals that didn’t match up with the reality of things.  Suddenly, the fear I’d pushed back so well for two years was right in front of me;  Is there anything that is certain? Anything that is secure? Where is the end of this? Where is the bottom?  I questioned and cried, terrified of the answers.

But what I didn’t know was that this was exactly how it was supposed to go.

I’m not speaking in superficial terms of providence, but instead about the capacity and strength of the human heart to hold grief, and pull us out of numbness with suffering — something we so often avoid.  It was in those questions and in my fear that I was finally forced to face the reality of disillusionment and death like I hadn’t been able (or perhaps willing) to before.  With nowhere left to turn, I surrendered and allowed myself to sit in the suffering until the sharp pangs of anxiety and fear melted into deep waves of grief.  This was the end, this was the bottom.

And I was broken, but I wasn’t shattered.

Remarkably, and with much gratitude, I found that the unexpected and unconditional gift within disillusionment is the heart’s amazing resilience – it’s ability to open to something much greater, much more filling, albeit much more complex than the illusions that we hold.  The human heart can use our suffering, (if we allow it) to break us out of numbness, out of the status quo, and open us up to the freedom of real hope.  This is not a simple optimism that what we’ve already done will go well, (or not be undone). It’s instead a hope that grants us the freedom of imagination for things beyond our current reality, beyond what has already been made in our image, what has already been done, (or undone).  Hope without grief is a flat substitute for the real thing. The kind of hope that engages our hearts and emboldens our spirits for real change can only come out of the depths of suffering — suffering we can not access as long as we are numbing it with our illusions.

To grasp this hope, we must be willing to come down from simple optimism, enter the depths, engage the grief and acknowledge the death of our illusions.

 The death of systems that can’t keep their promises,
    of outcomes that can be controlled,
    of security that was never secure.

There is also a very real danger in holding back grief when disillusionment hits.  When we deny our fear and grief in the face of disillusionment – instead of opening – we risk shattering our hearts, (and perhaps the hearts of others) with our internal, (and then eventually external) rage. We have to release our desperate grip on our illusions long enough to let the grief come so that we can search for and grasp the things that can’t be lost.  We need to engage our current suffering, our collective-individual suffering, so that we can live into the unconditional gift of a real hope that gives us the freedom of imagination for something better, or it threatens to destroy us all with an unconscious rage.

So may we look up from our desperate attempts at gathering and self-securing long enough to acknowledge the fear in ourselves and see it in each other’s eyes – and may we cry with them. May we mourn the things we’ve lost, and lament the things we’ve found were never there.

For hope without grief is no hope at all.
May we let go of outcomes and trust this process.

May all of us, in our disillusionment, in our frustration and disappointment in broken promises, plans gone awry and realities shattered, embrace the grief —  our collective-individual grief.

And from the place of our grief, may we tap into the heart’s incredible capacity to imagine something better.

–

* This post is part of the november synchroblog, different bloggers writing on the same subject. Franciscan Father Richard Rohr says, “The role of the prophets is to call us out of numbness.”  This month, bloggers were asked to write about changes, challenges and the role of ‘prophetic voices’ in being called into a better future.  See the other writings below:

• Joy Wilson at Solacetree- The Blessing of Losing Your Faith
• Jeremy Myers at Till He Comes – I Have a Dream
• Glenn Hager at Breathe – Uncomfortably Numb
• Linda at Kingdom Grace – On Earth as it is in Heaven
• Sally at Eternal Echoes – Where are the True Prophets?
• Tammy Carter at Blessing the Beloved – No Compromise
• Alan Knox at The Assembling of Church – My Word of Prophecy:  Quit Listening to Prophetic Voices
• Liz at Gracerules – Listen
• Christine Sine at Godspace – Surrounded by Prophetic Voices: Clouds of Witnesses That Call Us Out of Numbness
• Amy Martin – The Window of Suffering, the Beginning of Hope 
• Kathy Escobar at The Carnival in My Head- Rising Up From Below 
• K.W. Leslie at More Christ – What is God Challenging You to Do?
• Katherine Gunn at Truth Makes Freedom – Where is Your Heart? 
• Steve Hayes at Khanya – Murder of the Cathedral
• Leah Chang at desertsspiritsfire – Wall Street, Our Street

“There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it’s enough.”
― Richard Rohr

Yesterday was no ordinary Monday. Adding to the regular fun of the first day of the week,  yesterday became: Surprise Root Canal Monday!  Which, consequently, was not nearly as bad as Surprise Tooth Abscess Saturday! and wasn’t even a close comparison to I’m-Gonna-Rip-This-$%*#-Tooth-Out-With-My-Bare-Hands Sunday!  Fun times.  But, all of this tooth-induced suffering led to Monday, which actually turned out to be a rather novel and fun day for me.  Really.  I started the morning by calling my dentist’s office the second it opened so that I could beg for help…I mean an appointment.  The receptionist told me, “I’m sorry, the doctor is out of the office this week.”  This was not good news.  So I began a frantic call-and-beg-for-an-appointment mission ending with several offices telling me, “We don’t have any openings, but you really need to see someone today.”  Yeah, thanks for the advice.  Eventually I call up a dentist highly recommended by a friend and get in later that day.  This was a great stroke of luck – maybe even providence. This dentist was no ordinary dentist.  This was a dentist who rides his bike to work – who raises chickens, garlic and heirloom vegetables.  This was a dentist after my own heart.  “I can tell we’re going to be great friends,” he says as he sticks a large needle into the roof of my mouth.  Indeed, I think – because a friendly dentist is a good thing to have.  So, amongst conversation about dead nerves, drilling the pulp out of my tooth and and an explanation of how the infection was seeping its way into the soft tissue of my face, we were able to joke and laugh and share a lot about gardening and chicken husbandry techniques. Turns out we buy our chicks from the same hatchery and both feel terribly guilty when we have to lock the hens in their pens in the spring because of their tendency to scratch up a freshly-planted vegetable garden.  The chicken solidarity and friendly shop-talk were a nice distraction from discussing the decision between extracting my 1st bicuspid or just drilling the heck out it, flushing it with ethanol, stuffing it with cotton and coming back for more next Monday.

 “You’re nearly perfect in every way, it’d be a shame to loose that tooth,” saith the doctor, adding his two cents to the discussion.  “Well, wow.”  I reply, not knowing what else to say.  “Well, I mean your teeth are perfect, you might as well keep them all,” he clarifies.  “Oh, right.  I knew that.” Nothing like an awkward start when you’ve just met someone who will spend the next 45 minutes a foot from your face.  So, after a short discussion about pulling teeth and moving teeth and drilling teeth and making fake teeth, we decide on a root canal.  After several more shots in the mouth, this chicken-loving man I’ve known for less than half an hour puts on glasses with little binoculars on the end of each lens, dons a head-lamp and takes a drill to my nearly perfect mouth.  I lean back, look up at the clouds moving past the skylights and tell myself, Relax. It won’t be that bad. 

And it wasn’t, really.  Other than the creepy-factor of having someone drill out the center of your tooth and ream into the small channels of the roots with tiny instruments, it truly wasn’t that bad.  In fact, at some point I felt relaxed enough to ask, (assuming talking with dental instruments in your mouth counts as speaking) “Keh ah hee eh?”  “It hurts a little?” the doctor asks.  “Uh-uh,” I reply as I shake my head. I try again, suspecting this isn’t a normal request, “Keh ah HEE eh?” The doctor finally understands, “Oh, can you see it?  Really? Yes, you can, would you like a mirror?”  I nod, knowing this is probably the only time I’m going to be able to see the inside of one of my teeth and I hate to miss a new opportunity.  I think to myself, Dentists must be really good at deciphering communication by method of using only the back of your throat…I wonder if they take a class on that in dental school?  He hands me a mirror and I take a peek. The tooth is surrounded by a little blue tarp of sorts that isolates it from the rest of my mouth and makes it look like a tiny square patient on an operating table – maybe like a little white Sponge Bob Square Pants, (blessed be he, the eternal optimist).  For the most part it just looked like my tooth,  except for center was missing. “It’s totally dead,” says the doctor.  “It’d be bleeding like crazy by now if it was alive.”  I’m relieved – I think.  But that’s only because of the next part.  “I’m going to take these little files now and reach all the way down into your root canals, and take out any of the remaining decaying pulp.”  Oh, the root canals, of course! -I think to myself as I have an obvious realization.  So that he does, using files as small as needles to ream way down into the roots of the tooth.  I feel nothing, but out comes decaying pulp.  “It’s draining some infection fluid now, but we’re gonna pickle the rest of the bacteria with 100% ethanol.”  Nice. Apparently a dead tooth is a hostile land replete with disgusting terminology to describe it.  At least the bacteria will go out happy – flushed away with moonshine as they are.  So, drilled and reamed and pickled and stuffed with cotton, I pay them hundreds of dollars and then head to the pharmacy to pick up an antibiotic.

When I get to the pharmacy, I put in my prescription  and sit down with nothing to do but wait.  Waiting is hard. I sit there for a second, but then wonder if there are any activity restrictions so I call the dentist’s office to check, “Can I do yoga and run this week?” I ask the receptionist. The receptionist checks in with the dentist and replies, “The doctor says, ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!’ – so that means do whatever you want.”  Great!  I really like this dentist. I call my husband to update him on the status of my tooth and I talk to my four-year-old. True to his nature, he merges a highly practical streak with a touch silver lining, “Mom. If your toof falls out, you can just put it under your pillow and the toof fairwy will come!”  Then he adds rather seriously, “But you have to tell your parwents. So tell your parwents if your toof falls out, k?”  I decide to be proactive about this. I hang up and then promptly text my mom, “Mom, Owen says that if my tooth falls out, I have to tell my parents.” She texts back, “That’s true! Make sure and let us know!”   Texting while waiting for amoxicillin sure is entertaining! I decide its a great way to pass the time so I text my friend Shea about my special Monday.  She replies, with a fantastic auto-correct fail included, “That is awful!!! Sorry. That Judy sucks!”  I text back, agreeing that this tooth thing is the last straw, and I’ve had it with Judy too.  We both text-laugh, (which may or may not include any actual laughing) and agree to blame everything on “Judy” from here on out in order to memorialize this auto-correct fail occasion.  Dammit Judy. Then I text-update my friend Justin-the-Pastor who’d been periodically checking in on my tooth situation,  “Abscess, dead tooth, root canal.”  Then, since he’s a pastor it seemed fitting to add, “May it RIP. Do u think teeth have souls?”  He replies, “If they do, then they go to heaven.”  I imagine what a tooth soul might look like, and think to myself, that’s a lot of teeth souls.

Eventually, I’d texted everyone out to one-word replies and since I was still waiting, I decide to give up texting and put my head down on the table where I was sitting and listen to my ipod. Mumford & Sons sang to me, “You said that I would find a hole, deep within the fragile substance of my soul.” I give my textertainment technique one more shot and text Justin-the-Pastor again, “Mumford & Sons says ‘You said that I would find a hole, deep within the fragile substance of my soul.’ But in my case – its tooth.”  “Dork,” is his one-word reply.  Fine. I put my head back on the table and go back to my music.  After a few minutes an older woman walks by and says to me, “You look really tired.”  “Oh,” I reply, shrugging her off, “It’s Monday. And I just had a root canal.”  She looks at me as if that is much worse than tired and says, “I feel so sorry for you.  Do you have a ride home?”  Feeling like a root canal novice and not knowing whether or not rides home were standard protocol for root canals I just reply, “Yeah, thanks. I’m good. And it wasn’t that bad, really”.  She gives me sad eyes as if she believes I’m feigning bravery, and slowly pushes her cart away.

Soon I head home, amoxicillin in hand, hole drilled in my nearly perfect mouth and happy to be pain-free for the first time in three days.  I think about heirloom vegetables and garlic and chickens and really cool dentists and what an odd and novel day it was.  Who knew an emergency root canal on a Monday afternoon could lead to so many fun interactions and connections with people I both know and had never met – that even in the death and decay of a tooth I’d had with me for nearly thirty years, there was such joy to be found.

And that – must be the molar of the story.