Recollection

I'm through chasing after tomorrow, before I end up somewhere too fast
In a fight with the clock time will shoo me away, before the present can pass

It's a lyric I penned a while back but have never been able to make a song out of. Usually because it always just ends up mimicking the melody to Bright Eyes' Land-locked Blues. I think behind alot of my worry, anxiety, or depression is a deep-seated feeling that I am going to miss out on something. I do not know why that is. When I look back on my life, it is not hard for me to see a guiding sovereignty that I would give responsibility to as "God". I've had many moments that I can only attribute to something guiding this worried soul. Here's just a few.

In my final year of nursing I wanted to be a mental health nurse, so that is what I requested as my #1 desire for final practicums. But, as fate would have it I received First Nations nursing as my final practicum and went off to Ft St James. Besides the great family I was able to stay with and connections I was able to make, I was able to participate for a day in a mobile diabetes program for a day. It was a good day, and I didnt think much of it. That fall, the gentleman I worked with on that day emailed me and essentially asked if I'd be interested in the job as he remembered me from that day. I went in to ask questions, have an interview, and got hired on in a job I now quite enjoy and find rewarding and growing. The next year, I found myself in the same room in the Nakazdli health center, with the same client I had observed the previous year, with my now boss also in the room, but now I was the one who was conducting the interview. Moments that make you think, "hey, Im doing what Im supposed to be doing."

In my first summer of nursing I got to look after an elderly man who was dying of cancer. He was a man who you could tell had lived a full, loving life. He was full of grace, encouragement, and had a beautiful family who you could tell had blossomed growing up under the care of him and his wife. We got talking about music as he played, I mentioned what I played, and he offered me his harmonicas! Needless to say, you cannot accept gifts as a nurse, so while excited and grateful, I denied the offer. The next January I had the opportunity to play alongside some brilliant musicians through the Coldsnap festival. I held my own alongside Royal Wood and Catherine McLellan in a singer-songwriter workshop that was a gift to be a part of. At the end of the event, a woman came up to me and said, "I remember you! You were my father's nurse. He still remembered you when we went home, and he still wanted you to have his harmonicas. He has since passed." That is how I came to be in ownership of a beautiful man's harmonicas. A kind of connection that makes you feel as if you are in the right place using your gifts in the right way somehow.

On the morning of my 25th birthday it started to rain. I stayed in my tent hoping it would die down. It did temporarily, so I quickly packed up my tent, covered all my gear in a tarp and went to wait out the storm. A storm did indeed brew up. I sat beneath a tin roof in the dugout of a ball diamond as the lightning, rain, and thunder passed overhead. I read scripture, observed the red stones and countless spitz that covered the ground, and ate trail mix in the cute town called Lumsden. I had been delayed from making it to Regina because of harsh wind the previous day. But as I sat and enjoyed the sky full of melancholy I thought, "I think I was supposed to be here this morning."

A quote I read a few days before my birthday read thus:

To recollect yourself is to recover all your scattered energies- those of the mind, the heart and the body. It is to reassemble all the pieces of yourself flung in the four corners of your past or the mists of your future, pieces clinging to the fringes of your desires.   Michel Quoist

I feel as if the present is always what you need. If my history of countless moments of coincidence and blessing is any indication I need not be so eager to be anywhere but here. I feel alot of my own scattered energies returning to me this trip.

The Michel Quoist quote is followed by this note: "Most of us have neither time nor place for recollection in this busy life of ours- and thus the exhaustion. Recollection becomes a matter of priority only when we have experiences one too many times the tastelessness of a passionless life."

Happy recollections everyone, may you be able to enjoy today and, even if it is unpleasant, trust it is part of a bigger mosaic.