Answer the Call

Phone calls are not events as they used to be. You are no longer restricted to the length of the phone cord. There is no phone chair or table, especially designated for the occasion of communication. Now, it is texts between traffic lights, status updates in the midst of a good meal, and phone calls under palm trees to busy streets abroad.

“Did you get my calls?”

“You mean when I called you?” I offered to my beloved friend visiting from O`ahu, whom I thought had misarranged his words.

“No, when I called you.”

“You mean when we called to have you come visit on Kaua`i two years ago,” I smiled, little miss know-it-all.

“Noooo. When I called you and invited you to O`ahu, last year.”

    How was it, between email, cell phones, facebook, twitter, and even the coconut wireless I had missed that call? “No,” I stammered, “No, I didn’t get your calls.”

    It can be like that. We get the horoscope updates or the latest baseball scores. But when a dear one calls to say hello, when they are really saying they are lonely, we cannot hear them over our laundry machine. When our partner calls to say they don’t want to cook dinner, we cannot hear their vulnerable request for nurturing as we huff and puff about yet another thing we need to do - dinner. Sometimes calls for love sound like demands because if we are called to give we are called to receive. Sometimes that call for love, comes from within, and so very often receives a busy signal.

   
    Scared to receive? You scoff. No. Busy, yes. If you could, you would. Most of our busy-ness is an ornate overlay to keep us from embodying our true gifts. Some gifts are fancy and may require much training or practice. Some gifts are in the simplicity of bending down to receive a newly plucked flower from a child’s hand, for both giver and receiver are the same. But we need to be present to receive the gift, listening to receive the call.


    Nancy Slonim Aronie, a phenomenal woman and writer, mentioned several times in her recent workshop on Kaua`i: Writers write. Yes, I nodded. Yes, writers write.  I am doing more writing these days, but first I needed to get my “work” done (immediate subconscious diminishment of my craft as true work). Then, I mean, I really needed a better computer, and that was maybe something I could do in a few months. So, yes this all seemed true. Writers write and I would be doing that soon; I just needed to get ready. As long as I didn’t really write, I couldn’t really fail.


    Amazing that humans have been crafting stories without a Macbook Pro, without computers, without paper, but apparently that was where my Muse was residing, and my nimble fingers were artistically tied until the proper forum arrived, what to do? I was safely nestled into an unforgeable barrier that protected me from doing anything.


    A week ago, I walked home to find a box, movie-placement perfect, directly under the porch light - illuminated. It was a plain cardboard box. Smallish, really. And I knew what was in there. It could have been a box of dog treats, or a book I didn’t order from Amazon outlandishly wrapped in bubble tight protection. The box could even be for someone else. As all of these possibilities tossed through my mind and my heart raced a bit, I scanned the box to indeed see my name in laser printout font and I knowingly found my partner’s name as sender. I picked up the box, and laid it on my bed, a good three feet from my person.  And stood there.


    About three weeks prior to my lost phone call revelation chat, I walked across the Post Office parking lot to retrieve my mail.  I spotted a mutual friend, sitting in her car, chatting on her phone. She waved me over, “The phone’s for you!” she said.
   
    It was my beloved friend from O`ahu, telling me of his journey to Kaua`i and would I be available to receive him?  Without my phone number, without my twitter handle, in the middle of the radiating asphalt, I received the invitation: come. Apparently that call found me receptive without a social media update. How? Who placed that call?


    I stood in my bedroom staring at that unpacked computer. There it was the destroyer of my excuses. A clean slate; a sleek machine; a monstrous declaration of love and faith. A remover of obstacles that left me excuseless and naked, shivering a bit. I heard the ringing, and picked up the box, although I breathed a little too heavily into the receiver, much like a nervous teenager. Unbelievably, I slit open the cardboard and peered at the beckoning keys and potent void of the monitor - boundless, speechless - I auscultated for Beloved whisperings. Not certain what to say, I simply listened.

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Some commentary clarifies, but with love silence is clearer.
A pen went scribbling along, but when it tried to write love, it broke.

If you want to expound on love,
take your intellect out and let it lie down in the mud.
It’s no help.

You want proof that the sun exists, so you stay up all night talking about it. Finally you sleep and the sun comes up.
Look at it! Nothing is so strange in the entire world as the sun.
The sun of the soul is even more so. It has no yesterday! The physical sun is unique, but it’s possible to imagine something like it.

The spiritual sun
has nothing comparable, inner or outer.
Imagination cannot contain.
- Rumi