The Sacred Ordinary: Reunion

 

The Sacred Ordinary: Reunion

Invocation

Sunlight streamed through the slats of the old barn, casting golden stripes across dust and straw. I stood beside him—cream-colored dress, black ribbon at my neck, the air thick with memory. He wore a straw hat and suspenders, the same quiet steadiness in his posture that I remembered. Behind us, the cow watched like a witness to something ancient.

We hadn’t seen each other in two years. The barn was full of people, voices rising and falling, but none of it touched us. When our eyes met, the world blurred. We fell into that place we’d always known.

Meditation

It was like slipping through a trapdoor into the rabbit hole—our shared mind, our secret chamber. The crowd tried to distract us, to pull us back to the surface, but we were already submerged. For nearly fifteen years, we’d lived inside each other’s thoughts. That reunion wasn’t a beginning—it was a remembering.

I told him I owed him a debt I could never repay. He didn’t need to hear it. We both knew. In that moment, we were conjuring what we needed from the world. It was survival, yes—but also grace. The kind that only comes when two souls merge in silence.

Benediction

Eventually, we surfaced. The light shifted. The cow turned. The barn reclaimed its shape. We parted again, each carrying the imprint of that descent.

But the rhythm remains: chaos, immersion, return. And the image—two figures in a barn, dressed for memory, lit by something more than sun—reminds me that the sacred is never far. It lives in the ordinary, waiting for us to fall in again.

The Sacred Ordinary: Benediction in the Washroom

The Sacred Ordinary: Benediction in the Washroom

Invocation

I spent my life in classrooms, absorbing what I was told I needed to know. I thought that once I graduated, the world would welcome me with open arms. But it didn’t. The world didn’t care.

So here I am, in a low-level job at a chick hatchery, scraping chicken droppings off wire trays where life first cracked open. The smell is sharp. The work is repetitive. The trays are caked with feathers and filth.

Meditation

My coworkers retreat to the washroom on breaks, slumped over in silence or muttering about how bad they feel. I take pity on them sometimes. “This is essential work,” I say. “We’re midwives to the miracle.” They smile for a moment, until the boss storms in to bark orders and reclaim his borrowed sense of importance. The smiles vanish. The bummer returns.

But I stay awake. I stay aware.

And in my mind’s eye, I hold another scene:

A misty morning on the farm. A young woman stands in faded jeans and a flannel shirt, rubber boots planted in damp earth. Her hair is tied back with a plain bandana. Behind her, a black and white cow waits quietly in the fog, autumn leaves scattered like blessings at their feet. The barn leans into the mist, weathered and holy.

This is the world that does welcome me.

Not with applause, but with presence.

Not with status, but with stillness.

Benediction

Even in the washroom, scraping trays, I carry the image of that morning—

the cow, the mist, the girl in work clothes—

and I remember:

The sacred is not elsewhere.

It is here.

In the shit and the silence.

In the fog and the flannel.

In the ordinary, made holy by attention.

A Life in the Field

 

  

Mandy — A Life in the Field

When I think of Mandy now, the memory that comes first is the auction ring: my stepdad beside me, the clatter of hooves and the hum of voices, and the dizzying rush of being young and determined. I was in my late teens, new to bidding and already in the rabbit hole. I’d bid on the first two teams that came through the ring and been the high bidder at about $2,000 a team, but the owner hesitated and wouldn’t let them go. By the time the third team came out I was so wrapped up in the moment I had to ask my stepdad what I’d bid on the last one. Then a pair of mares walked in, and I bid up to $1,800 and bought them. Mandy was one of those mares.

From Auction to Field

We trained that team together. I was there for the small, ordinary miracles: the first tentative steps of foals, the way a mare would nudge her newborn toward milk, the long days in the field when the sun sat low and everything smelled like hay and earth. I remember milking them by hand when I took them away from the farm and their foals to pick up corn at other Amish farms. I spent years in the field with those horses, learning their rhythms and earning their trust.

When Mandy’s mate died, it felt like the end of an era. But Mandy kept going. She became my steady partner for many years after that—pulling, working, standing quietly beside me when the day was done. She gave me foals, she gave me work, and she gave me a kind of companionship that’s hard to name.

The Last Day

A few days ago she didn’t come back to the barn. I went into the woods to find her and discovered she had laid down and could not get up. I tried to move her into a better position, but she simply couldn’t rise. In that moment the choice became clear and terrible: to let her continue suffering, or to stop it. I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was trying to end her pain or my own.

My mom, my stepdad, and I were there together. I put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger. It was a very sacred moment for all of us. When she stopped breathing, the pain stopped—for her and for us. As I walked away a conviction reverberated through me: WE WILL MEET AGAIN GIRL. That certainty felt like a promise and a balm.

David and me on the Farm

 We were young when we met, we were both 16. At that time my mom, step dad and I were having a very hard time running the dairy farm. There was a lot of stress and things were looking bad until David showed up. Even at 16 he made a great difference in our lives and especially mine. He was as dedicated to the farm and the cows as I was and we would work together day in and day out. It was wonderful. I got to the point where I was so grateful that I would do anything for him

After a few years he got married and brought his wife to live on the farm too. But our relationship didn’t change. We were still dedicated to the cows and making the dairy work was the most important thing to us.  Unfortunately, his wife's family moved away and he was forced to leave our dairy.

Invocation

It was the night before he left. I woke from a sound sleep, the air thick with smoke. No time to dress, no time to think—just the instinct to run, barefoot and bare-armed, down to the wood stove in the basement.

Meditation

Our houses were connected below ground, like roots of two trees entwined. David had smelled it too. We met in the haze, both breathless, both alert. The pipe had come loose—nothing more. But something else had come loose in me. In the dim light, with the smoke curling around us, I saw him not just as a friend or a farmhand, but as the one I would have given everything to. Not out of desperation, but out of a fullness I didn’t know I carried.

Benediction

It didn’t happen, of course. He left the next day. But I’ve held that moment like a candle in a dark room—waiting, still, for the one who will make me feel that way again. The one I’ll give myself to, completely, without fear.

The boar was loose.

Not just from his pen, but from the grip of reason.

He charged through the neighborhood like a storm with tusks,

snorting defiance at fences, dogs, and decency.

My stepdad handed me the task:

“Take the dogs. See what you can do.”

So I did.

And the dogs did.

And Mister Pig did what male ego does best—

he refused.

Meditation

The fight was real.

Two dogs against one boar,

and me, standing witness to the rawness of instinct.

I saw the struggle not just of flesh,

but of pride, resistance, and the slow dawning of wisdom.

When I lifted the wire mesh and offered Mister Pig a way back,

he paused.

Not because he was beaten,

but because even the stubborn recognize sanctuary

when it’s offered with clarity

Benediction

Mister Pig crawled back under the fence.

The dogs stood down.

And I stood still,

watching the fog lift from the field of my own understanding.

Even the cantankerous, the ornery, the ego-bound—

they know a good idea when they see it.

And we all lived,

if not happily ever after,

then at least with a little more grace.

Meditations on the Sacred in everyday Life

 

She stood in the hush of morning, where fog softened the edges of everything—barn, cow, breath. The lace at her collar held the memory of hands that once stitched in silence, and the ribbon at her throat felt like a prayer tied gently to the body. The cow watched her with ancient eyes, unhurried, unafraid, as if recognizing something holy in the stillness.

The earth received her offering without judgment, holding both failure and hope in the same palm. Each seed was a confession, each handful of soil a promise. She did not know what would rise, only that the act itself was enough

The mule did not speak, yet its silence was a language of trust. Its presence was steady, unadorned, a companionship beyond words. She felt her own breath slow to match its rhythm, as if the creature carried her into a deeper stillness.

Labor was not punishment but prayer, each splinter a bead on the rosary of survival. The fence held stories of storms, of animals sheltered, of hands that had built and rebuilt. She felt the ache in her palms as devotion disguised as endurance.

Rest was not escape but return, the body remembering it belonged to the earth. The grass bent gently around her, the sky dimmed to a tender blue, and she felt herself dissolve into the rhythm of evening.

 

🌿 Riding the Orange Bus

The orange bus idled in front of the packing house like a promise. Anyone who wanted to pick oranges could climb aboard, and that morning I did. I was the only white person on the bus, but for once I wasn’t the only female. The driver was a big, warm-hearted Black woman named Sally Mae, and one of the pickers was a Jamaican girl.

Sally offered me an orange bag to pick with but warned I’d have to buy it if I stayed on. Soon we were rolling toward the grove, where a tractor trailer delivered bins to all twelve pickers. The rhythm was simple: pick as fast as you could until the bins were full. By the time the bins ran out, I had filled four. Most of the others had six to eight, but the Jamaican girl had four too. Since pay came by the bin, anything less than four meant you couldn’t survive. For me, survival was the goal—and I was proud. Sally Mae was proud of me too.

Over time, Sally Mae took me under her wing. She became my surrogate mother, finding me a place to stay and defending me fiercely. I remember her announcing to everyone on the bus that I was one of them—even if I was white. I loved her for that.

Life on the bus was raw and real. Sometimes we’d stop to pick up a worker who wouldn’t come out because he was too hungover, and Sally would send a couple of guys in to drag him out. Every morning, the crew showed up at my door, and together we drove to a new grove. At night, they brought me back to the little house Sally had arranged for me in the orange grove.

Once in a while, another white newcomer would sit beside me and ask what it was like. My answer was always the same: “It’s hell.” And it was—for them. No white newcomer lasted more than a day that winter. But for me, it was different.

The outsiders came and went, unable to bear the grind. But we stayed—rooted in oranges, laughter, and belonging. For them it was hell; for us, it was home.

Come May, a letter arrived from my mother asking me to return to the farm to help out. It felt less like a request than a summons, a sign that it was time to go back. Leaving Sally was hard—we hugged, we cried, we promised—but promises couldn’t hold against time. It wasn’t meant to last, only meant to change me.