Ausgespielt

My mom was small and energetic.  There were six of us kids, four boys then two girls.  I would often awaken to the smell of steam, mom ironing in the not-yet light house after my dad had left for work.  By the time evening came, we’d be in the living room watching TV and she’d be on the couch falling asleep.  We’d watch her head nod back, he mouth opening, and we’d find it funny. 

But the truth was that she was ausgespielt, a German word she would use that literally means all spilled out.  When I began writing this blog, the words began coming to me as I began to stir while still in bed.  My motivation for writing it was, after all, to let people know what was going on inside me, so that if my heart condition ended my life, they would know that I was in a fine mental state, grateful for a good life.  Daily I had the experience of waking as if with the first line of a poem, the rest of it coming to me as I sat at my keyboard.  I was stunned sometimes at how much was stored up in me.

After four months of this daily discipline, of beginning my morning at this computer committing my thoughts to those who choose to read it, I began noticing that my material was coming not from this apparently endless reservoir of memory and insight, but from the gifts of the previous day.  At first this troubled me, and I recalled a good friend who was a columnist at the Free Press, who confided that coming up with good stuff three times a week was sometimes a real pain.  But then I realized that this is a certain growth, a turning out for the substance of my life, rather than turning in.  All spilled out, I began to look outside of myself for new material

There is a great Gospel song that I’ve shared about here, (Click for a link)  but just now made sense to me, made sense of this change in my source of meaning.  “My storage is empty,” it goes, “and I am available to you.”  I think that we often tend to fill ourselves up and then pour ourselves out.  We talk about running out of energy, or having to recharge our batteries, or being exhausted.   We can all recall, I suspect, driving along on the interstate, our minds on what awaits us, or processing the experiences of the day, when we notice with a shock that the fuel gauge needle is pointing to the E.  Our pulse quickens, our pupils dilate, and we are intensely aware of our surroundings, fully in the present.  We’re in the moment.  We are grateful for every mile we cross, the gift of every drop of fuel.

It hits me what a gift this is, to be running on empty.  I am energized not by what I’ve stored up, but by the experiences of the day.   And in turn, I realize that I’m more aware of every drop of experience, and how it moves me, how it energizes me.  

I’m more aware of grace, this thing that comes to me, moves me, the wind in my sails, my engine now stilled by an empty fuel tank.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.