Gifts arrive Tapping

May 12, 2010

We are a gifted people.  Gifts swirl and whirl around us nudging for recognition.  They call us to take notice, not for their sake but for or own.  Gifts come in many fashions, forms, colors, feelings, blending or contrasting our emotions, our intellect, our groundedness, and our loftiness.  They are persistent.  Folding around us, we might not notice them for days or weeks or years, maybe never in this created time, yet they wait for a moment when barriers melt and sensibleness takes a break and tap our shoulder and smile.

Tap, tap, tap.  A friend’s wife passed away just a bit ago.  The following days and weeks are a moment in life we might imagine but never fully understand unless and until it is of our own life.  He wrote, reminding me, that couples find rituals speaking of their deep and abiding relationship.  These rituals are gifts of life, not to be lost when life flows from stroking caress to fondling spirit. In times of joy, he wrote, the two of them would take time to jump.  Jump for no other reason than to express the joy of moment and of life.  Jump wherever and in whatever landscape they found themselves.  He wrote he would be entering into relationship with a congregation in the near future—bringing a lifetime of tapping gifts.  Would we, he wrote, all those who were listening, join him in the evening, wherever we found ourselves, and jump?  Could we take a moment and jump with the physical enthusiasm of moment, and the spiritual enthusiasm of life?

Tap, tap, tap.  I am not always so good a listener.  The tap was insistent though.  Early evening and I had just got off the tractor and Belinda met me with a smile.  “Don’t you want to jump up and down?  You’ve got the tractor and swather running and are cutting hay!”  I’d already forgotten my promise to jump this evening.  Now it all felt a little weird.  Belinda smiled again though and I told her about the promise to jump this evening at an appointed hour, and that hour was but a few minutes away.  Belinda is a little more embodied than I—well, a lot more—and as we walked to the house she was already jumping.  A few minutes later we held hands and we jumped.

We are a people with the gift of jump.  As children or adult, able bodied in multiple ways, fully embodied or just a little, a jump here and there will always do us well.

© David B. Bell 2010