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Recently my spiritual director and I leaned into a conversation about how abundance is not synonymous with comfort.
It’s a hard season for our family. My husband’s job went through a sudden change and he’s putting in long hours, which means I’m putting in long hours with kids. It feels like there is not enough or too much of a lot of things—too many hours or not enough, too much work, not enough energy, too many needs, not enough hands, too many unknowns. So I’ve been returning to a note I put up by my kitchen sink before my youngest was born last fall.
Live the question: How can I become aware of abundance?
Not how can I create it, but how is divine abundance already there? How can I tune in and notice and find threads of it already running through the fabric of my daily life?
What I noticed in the conversation with my spiritual director is that, at least in Western society, there is a tendency to equate abundance with comfort. When I search for abundance in my life, I often search for moments of gratitude and joy, moments that feel good, moments when I can notice the Divine showing up. But if this is true, then my ability to find abundance in this season is limited. I notice a lot more scarcity than abundance.
Hence, what if my perspective of what abundance feels like shifts? I begin to look for it in the cracks of my long, worn-out days.
One night I am putting three children to bed on my own. My six-year-old is so tired she can’t regulate. I revert to washing her in the bathtub because she can’t seem to take a shower on her own. She screams the whole time. My six-month-old lies on the floor in the hallway and screams as well. When child one is washed and wrapped in a towel, she will not move from the bathroom floor and I carry her, still screaming, to her room. Child two goes into the bath. I lock the door to keep child one from coming back. She beats on the door relentlessly. Child three continues to cry on the floor. My four-year-old thankfully is chipper. “Sister is having a hard time,” I say as I rinse and wash her mess of curls. “Yep,” she says, taking it all in stride. I am only one adult and there are three kids who all need multiple somethings from me at once. I too would like to cry and scream and shout at everyone to be quiet to give my rankled nerves a chance to reset. Instead, I start chanting. The streams of my mother’s love run daily through me. The streams of my father’s love run daily through me. From the holy fountain of life to the seed throughout the whole creation. I sing instead of scream, and the resonance of the sound vibrates through my body. I don’t take my frustration out on my children—mostly. Eventually they all calm and find sleep. Was there abundance here?
I can’t manage to write. It’s been seven months since the birth of my third child and I’ve managed one hurried blog post months ago. One afternoon while I am hacking at thorn bush roots with an axe (see my last post), my thoughts are brimming with words but there is no way to get to a computer to write them down. So I do what I’ve never done before. I pull out a note on my phone and begin voice texting. Later I erase from the log answers to questions about popsicles. Yet despite interruptions and juggling chaos, I have over four hundred words down in some form when I am done. It is the beginning of what eventually becomes a post two weeks later. I can choose to feel frustrated or I can put words down the way that I can. Did I find a way to honor a bit of myself in the midst of my motherhood chaos? Did I snatch a bit of abundance?
I pray with my body while standing in tree pose during yoga practice, my mat rolled out on my front porch, my baby already fussing before I can finish the twenty-minute session. Place your arms where is feels right for you, Adriene says, and I extend mine outward, hands cupped, holding my core for balance. Please, Mother God, I internally whisper, expressing the desire with my body. Be my stability. On day three of four with my husband out of town, I feel in danger of coming apart at the seams. When I realize I missed setting out the overflowing lawn bins for the trash pick-up, I want to crumple into a ball and cry. It is not the lawn bins per se. It is the fact that I can’t juggle it all no matter how hard or long I labor. I am tired and want to give up, but I make myself show up on the yoga mat. For a brief moment I extend my arms in prayer. Is this too a form of abundance, that I reach for self-care at all and remember to make my body a prayer?
My husband replaces the kitchen faucet that has been purchased and waiting in our mudroom for six weeks. The old one wouldn’t shut off properly, often requiring multiple attempts to get the flow of water to stop. It’s been leaking so long my anger at it has abated into resigned normalcy. The replacement requires chaos in my kitchen, the contents from under the sink littering the floor. Boxes, tools, and trash from the exchange pile up beside it. I help my daughter pack her school lunch, picking my way through the debris, while my baby cries impatiently from the next room, wanting to go to bed. Once I have everyone settled, I hope to put the kitchen back to normal, but five minutes after my infant is asleep, tornado sirens bellow warning and I must rouse my children and descend to the basement to read books until the storm passes. Nothing feels easy or straight forward. Yet the next morning I relish the ease of the faucet turning off as I do the dishes. One small thing is flowing the way it should. It is such a small thing in the midst of so much to do, yet I accept its presence with gratitude and sense love from my husband in his labor to make the switch. It is something I will use countless times a day, countless chances to remind me that abundance flows despite everything that feels contrary.
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Shalom.
Danielle Klafter 