Cut and Tape

The tape on the boxes is six to seven layers thick on some of them. It’s doubled over, split open again, then retraced more times than can be healthy, for anyone with any right and just sense of order, proportion and priority. But a month in, and I have none of these sensibilities, having lost something to the problem of time and distraction. Perhaps too much time and the pursuit of the fruitless distraction, until I’m snapped back into my senses by crisis, whether it be my own or another’s. I was tempted to write ‘mine own’ there, and hope I can ascribe it to good reading slipped into the silent spaces where we can find them.

The tape on the boxes is an indication of busyness and burden, a lack of fruitful time, true leisure, put to good use. One month in and those moments have been there in their plenty, but the first week was a flurry of unpacking, organising and arguing our way into a sense of comfortable permanence - enough for a home that will be ours whilst another of our own intent comes together, piece by piece. Tape over tape, torn open and patched up again, cardboard boxes that wheeze and sag, half emptied, buckling under the weight of others that are deigned not to be opened until we find home again, in the expanse that we’ve been blessed with, about three kilometres from here.

Tape over tape, when we don’t steal away moments on our bikes, huddled around the scrabble board, or throwing myself, finally, into reading some Blake and Flannery O’Connor. But I let myself be waylaid by failing tools, that lock me out and refuse to acquiesce to either my polite requests, or my infuriated demands. When the moment presents itself that I can find the time to write, or set it aside in the early morning, the keyboard will not reach through the ether, and the cost of elegance makes itself known. So whilst I’m thankful for the clean lines of what they call a magic mouse and keyboard, I’m driven to despair when they fail to wake the machine and allow me to ramble upon the bare expanse.

It’s a terrible feeling to know that you have more time than ever, but are seemingly bound to doing less of something you love so much. There has been, thanks be to God, time time for prayer, for the children, to play more guitar than I had for a long time. But my childish obsessions jut out and scrape against my loved ones, who are rightly preparing and planning for the things that matter most, like a new school, a new home, or a new network of friends in the kind of community we always longed for. I have an awful set of prerequisite demand that press up against logic, reason and duty. But the garage is finally functional, the spaces are balanced with purpose, without clutter and cramping. I’m able to train and the kids can access their bikes without issue. Little things that compound, build or confuse, to create either a home, or a crisis, when having failed to attend to them.

There have been enormous benefits to the our new locale. Access to reverent, daily mass rises over and above any other consolation, as does access to sacraments such as reconciliation, available before and after every single mass. We’re surrounded by wonderful, thriving families living out the gospel, each in their own, beautiful way, with children spilling out across their lives. We have life, and we have it ‘in abundance.’ The children’ school, is a wonderful, loving and humble community oriented towards virtue as much as academic capacity, and we know that they’re surrounded by loving and caring adults that are as much a part of the community as they are, committed to the same values, ideals and priorities as our own.

There is a peace, an expansive silence at night, that stretches out over us in a way that I’ve never known. The stars carry themselves with a marked difference, an iridescence that I’ve only dreamed of, washed out by the streetlights, lamps and noise of a life that preceded this one. I think I remember, somewhere along the way, a silent prayer that I could recede, hide, in my own small way. A prayer that I be less distracted, divided, drawn by the business of movement, motion, rather than being. There was a prayer for solitude, for silence, and now I know it in a way that is altogether new, stepping back and away to hear and see in a different way that before. I bring my wife, my children, my vocation, thinking about Teresa entrusting all to St Joseph and laying down her foundations with a steadfast resolve and clarity of vision, matched only by her humility and simplicity, to establish the life of her Discalced nuns in a  wider cultural milieu that was hostile to all that she held dear in her heart.

I think of Therese, finally being able to enter the cloister, leaving behind so many that she loved, but endeavouring to draw deeper, closer, so resolutely, to a passionate love affair with ‘He whom we know loves us.’ There is a reckless abandonment in what we pursue, but there is such a sense of purpose, of deliberate fidelity, that it colours each day with an honour and dignity that dispels every past sense of fatalism, or listlessness - when we let it. So I’ll cut the boxes and tape them back up again, as long as it takes, til we get that part right too.