Infinite waves of awe

Saturday Feb 15th I had already watched the sunset with Javier as he got out from the surf that I had gotten worked by an hour prior. As we walked to his aunts apartment compound in las Delicias, Trujillo, Peru to shower and get ready for our date night, I felt the sunset calling me back. The sun had already set but I left Javi to chat with his aunts and I went and sat on the rocks where I proposed to and committed to loving him for the rest of my life this time last year. 

The post sunset colors where still transforming the sky and as I invited stillness into my body I felt this wave of emotion flow through me. I felt grandma. And unlike the 100s other times I’ve shed tears over the sadness of seeing her aging body dwindling, this time was different. It wasn’t sorrow or sadness that brought the tears to my face, it was this emotion of awe; like when you reach a mountain peek and and you look up to see such vastness beyond comprehension, beauty beyond words, God and all the creation so infinite and me so finite. It was this kind of tear that was flowing down my face. 

It’s hard to put words to describe such awe, beauty, and power. Everything falls short, but I will try:

I felt awe of Grandma Ida. An awe of all she was, during her time in the earthly body God had gifted her. Awe in this deep knowing that her legacy lives on, her love lives on, her fingerprint on each of the lives and earth she cared for lives on.  

I felt awe of Grandma’s simpleness. During the three decades that I was blessed to know her she didn’t need much to find happiness. She could sit all day watching her waterfall or a bird nest as it came to life and flew away. When she could still walk up the hill she tiled the earth and received joy from what each season harvested. She did not subscribe to the go go go and stuff focused world. She needed nothing and was 100% ok with doing what some would concider “nothing”. God’s nature provided all the joy she needed. Her happiness was not measured by the world but was deep within.

I felt awe of Grandma’s self-made revolutionary way of being. At 25, grandma’s revolutionary life hit me as I sat at a cafe eating hummus in Jerusalem with a second cousin I hadn’t seen since we were both in diapers. We got talking about the lineage of revolutionary women we come from and how it flows through our blood. All the way back to our great grandma every generation of women in our family has a college and higher education. Each held jobs or roles in their community and families that made wide reaching impact. Grandma was also revolutionary in her convictions. She stood her ground during the de-segregation of schools and kept her daughter in the desegregated school while her pastor and friends pulled their daughters out to attend the all-white school. She voted according to God’s wisdom not cultural expectations. She loved inclusively even when culture told her that that wasn’t what “God wanted”. She always held on to a deeper wisdom than the current cultural current, and held fast to the wisdom within God’s unconditional love for all.  You’d never find her at the front of a protest line, at a pulpet pushing her beliefs on others, or doing “good” things in the community to make herself feel good. Grandma had no ego, no need for recognition, or desire to receive something in return.  She simply spoke her truth by simply living it, and not caring what others had to say about it. She knew God’s wisdom of love deeply, and was stubborn in living it out, even if it ruffled cultural feathers of the time.

I felt awe of Grandma’s honor and preservation of deep family roots. She spearheaded family reunions, and kept log of our family tree, and always had a story of the previous generations of family members to share with us, keeping them alive. It seemed everyone was somehow family, and she treated everyone as such. She opened up her home to teen moms needing a safe space to raise their babies, treated all of the teens in her Sunday school class with the same stubborn love she gave us (She saw the best in you and held you up to it), and made house visits (no matter how far a drive) to anyone in pain or morning.  Family was number 2 right after her faith, and since she saw us all as children of God, we are ALL family. 

I felt awe of Grandma’s way of loving. Her love story with grandad is one for the bigscreen. “War can not stop love!”. She burned her love letters in fear we would laugh at them but would be quick to pull out the tiger and anaconda skins he sent her from India during the war and share stories of her and grandad’s stubborn, never faltering love against all barriers the world put against them. She talks of love as a matter of fact, not a fluffy fleeting feeling, but a true partnership, commitment, and way of life. Since love wasn’t an emotional feeling she didn’t find the need to say “I love you” often because it was a matter of fact; she loves you!

These waves of awe continued to flood me. What a woman! What a life! What a faith! What a love! Then I felt the whisper of “let me go so I can keep living”. She had been trapped in her aging body for years now, unable to walk the hill to her garden, unable to speak her wisdoms, unable to keep her eyes open to see her waterfall. She wanted to reach 100 and she always accomplished what she set out to do. She lived an extra year just for us, to give us the time we needed, but now it was her time. I breathed in holding on to all the awe of who she is and I exhaled letting her go knowing that while her body may be finite like the flowers she loves, her spirit, her legacy, her love is infinite as the God she loves. In no way will her departure from her body be the end of her story. 

Her aging body finally released her the next day Feb 16th at noon. And once again she accomplished what she set out to accomplish, We all went to church together, sang her favorite hymns together, walked in her woods together, and we all spent the night together in the home she built in the middle of the woods by a waterfall for this sole purpose, to create a home for us to come together as family.