Rooted and Grounded
The Way It Is, by William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
A friend explained this poem as a way of imagining how we exist with God. He said that he had learned to imagine this thread we follow as one of love, of hope, of a safe connection to God, and that God is always holding one side of our thread. Yet, we might drop the thread. We might turn away from it or get tangled in threads of other sort.
These are times, my friend explained, that we might cut the thread for a time. When we do so, the thread, shorter for its cutting, brings us, when we do find our way back to holding on, closer to God.
My friend who told me this story has terminal cancer, and this cancer has progressed significantly in recent months. When I last saw this friend, one of the teens I was with at the time asked if this friend would die soon. And understanding this as an unavoidable fact, the teen then commented that this friend seemed to be at peace. And it’s true. Deep peace in fact.
This, I imagine, is where we are drawn when we learn to hold the particular thread in Stafford’s poem—we walk steadily into a geography of peace even though truly we can never stop time’s unfolding. Peace is on the other side of learning to feel that there is a force holding the other end with us.
When I’m walking the cliff-edge of uncertainty, I sometimes find myself wishing I could wrap a thick rope around my waste and tie myself to a physical structure I can see. When I’ve done so, though, I wouldn’t say this way of being has created actual peace.
So this is the image I landed on this morning. Now that I’m gardening, or attempting to, I have witnessed the way that some of the plants I’ve purchased have a healthier root structure than others. Recently I pulled out a Hellibore that was so root-bound that I had to sit and painstackingly unravel fiber by fiber for nearly 20 minutes before I could put the plant in the ground. This plant had been kept in an ill-fitting container for too long. I imagined this morning that this is sometimes what happens when we lose track of the thread that connect us to the source of love and hope in our life, when we start following a series of threads that draw us more and more tightly into a state of anxiety, or fear, or expectation; more and more tightly into a way of existing that makes it difficult to become rooted and grounded in good soil.
I like to remind myself that finding the one true thread requires that I come to a safe and connected geography in my nervous system. To begin with curiosity about how it might be possible to abide in peacefulness—no matter what circumstances arise. My friend doesn’t seem to be choked by the roots that cancer have tangled around his life. He seems very much to be now, as ever before, following a different thread, not letting it go. Invisible as it may be to others, the geography this thread has brought him to is quite evident.