Wake Up Call

Rev. Dr. Kate Winters

Saturday, April 22nd

The call of the owl was comforting on Tuesday, a sign of the ongoing presence of my mother during unsettling times. This morning, however, she seems to be sending a wake up call. I literally slept all day yesterday, not rising until 4:30 in the afternoon, a full twelve and a half hours later than usual. When upon waking this morning, I immediately began to think that I was supposed to be in Portland hooked up to all sorts of medical machinery, when the call came through my open window, sounding not soothing but rather impatient. “Listen up,” she seemed to say, “shouldn’t you be feeling gratitude? You are alive, you are free, it’s a beautiful day. Get out of that bed and live!”

The owl channeling my mother is wise. It’s true I’ve been spending too much time in bed lately. Not all of that time can be attributed to my heart condition. I am, after all, newly retired. The medical diagnosis has given me a convenient excuse not to deal with what that really means to me. It has put off my planned period of silence and anything else I had hoped to do in this time. The owl calls once again. (I swear it can read my mind.) “Get out of that bed!”

So, here I am, up and writing. Perhaps these two weeks of delay is not only disappointment, but a gift. I can be dealing with something else I’ve been putting off so that when I get out of the hospital, it won’t all just be sitting here waiting for me. Perhaps I can at least find a way to move forward.

I need to turn my work office at home into what I am calling my “hermitage.” I want a room in the house that calls me to prayer, reflection, silence, and writing. Joel and I used to go yearly to a cabin that did these things for me in Rangeley, Maine (yes, the land of the moose!). I was in a whole different mindspace when I got to that cabin. I attribute a large part of that to the simplicity and sparseness of the space itself – it held nothing more than the essentials for daily living. It had a tiny kitchen, a sofa and chair, a bed and bath, a table to write on, and a screened in porch upon which to take in the sunrise. I felt a deeper contentment there than I had anywhere else on earth. That is what I am hoping for in my hermitage.

The biggest challenge is not in setting up the room, just this week we had one of the small windows replaced with a large screened one. It seems to take the whole backyard including the woods inside. I love it. The hardest part is that the rest of the rooms holds my whole life in boxes! Books that I have loved and have changed me from grad school and seminary. At least three decades of liturgical writing – sermons, services, and hymns. Pictures and other objects from my parents’ home after my mother died. What to save? What to let go?

It is not as simple as getting rid of the “clutter” as all the books say. I think it has more to do with figuring out who I am now and what am I about? What is essential to me at this stage in my life? Having had no children, having let go of my church family, having siblings living in other states all with their own children and grandchildren, it is not an easy question for me to answer. I feel untethered, really. What and who am I to serve? This is the question that is calling me to my hermitage. Now that I have gotten out of bed.