stillness Archives - Laurie Klein, Scribe

Dear friends, we are between Noels, past and pending. Welcome to “Oasis: Between Noels, Part II.”

Errands . . . gatherings . . . holiday lists . . . To misquote Hamlet, “To do or not to do, that is the question.”

Dare I multitask? Count hurry a virtue, knowing the word “haste” once meant “violence”?

A slower pace might evoke peace.

Consider the camel. Measured, intentional steps plod across shifting dunes, thus prevent the body from sinking.

When I married Dreamer, unresolved childhood sorrows sometimes buried me. “Tell me a story,” I said one day, desperate for a distraction.

Enter “Luigi the Camel.” Dreamer launched what would become a tradition.

For instance: Accidentally kidnapped one day, hapless Luigi headlined the visiting circus. On a wintry eve in December, Luigi gate-crashed the school Christmas pageant.

To this day, I cannot spell the sounds that camel makes! If laughter is medicine, Luigi reliably shoos away my blues.

Camels, I think, must be optimists. For one thing, a camel instinctively knows how to cope. Escalating heat? No worries; fur reflects light. Plus, the animal’s remarkable countercurrent blood flow cools the body as well as brain.

Fatty tissue stored in the hump can be metabolized into water as well as energy. Ingenious nostrils cradle precious expelled vapor, reabsorb it for later use.

Might these conserving actions relate to treasuring the Word in one’s heart? So many words already fill my holiday lists. I also want to store God’s Word within.

I need an oasis. A daydream. A side-trip, real or not.

I could follow Luigi into Macy’s. Or take a backyard mosey, shoeless, like Moses, padding into the realm of stillness where an eloquent bush might, for a moment, blaze, as if it knows my name.

“So much depends on the light,” Margaret Atwood says, “and the way you squint.”

Give me prayer, practical as a camel’s translucent third eyelid: moving back and forth, sweeping away debris; clearing vision, for close-ups as well as vistas.

Did you know the Arabic word for camel means “beauty”?

Friends, may we step lovely toward the unknown . . .

Here’s a walking prayer I’m using these days, a verbal oasis. In waltz time, hold each line in your mind, or speak or sing it aloud, with each inhale and exhale.

I am Yours,
chosen and known,
evermore,
Yours alone.
Even now,
breath and bone,
Holy Noel,
sing me home.