As I was sitting in my living room this morning, I heard an ambulance go by several blocks away.
When I was a little girl, anytime I heard an ambulance (or as my mother used to call it “the Emergency Wagon”), I ran home as if my curly red head were on fire. Everything about the sound of the siren terrified me. It screamed Disaster with a capital D. As I ran, I could feel its hot, fetid breath on my neck; its decaying bony hands trying to snatch me up to deliver me to chaos, further injury, and death. Once that siren began, I needed to get home, now, to safety. As I opened our home’s oak double dutch front door, I knew. Some other little girl (or little boy, or mom or nana) was grabbed, and it was only a matter of time before I or someone in my family wouldn’t run quite fast enough.
This morning in recalling that, I thought about how a whisper of the word “emergency” can still send shivers down my spine. Emergency meeting, emergency room, emergency landing …poor word…it has such a negative connotation (at least for me).
But it was then that I realized that in order to live a dynamic and full life, I had to be in a constant state of emergency: like Waldo who suddenly emerges from a picture after hours of searching for him, a rose stem that emerges through the soil after a long winter, or a baby who emerges from the protective womb of its mother after nine months of preparation.
Emergence-cy, the state of emerging, can be magical and life-giving and life-affirming. It is often treated as crisis because it’s scary to bring something (that had been overlooked) into clear view, or to watch as what we know to be solid ground is pushed aside to make room for new growth, or to stretch beyond the body’s established physical and emotional limits to welcome life into the world (while shedding precious blood, amniotic fluid, and tears). Frankly, it can be quite a mess.
But if I am not in the process of emerging, what am I doing except finding my safety in remaining hidden, staying underground, refusing to be birthed?
I think that for the rest of my life, I will shudder a little when I hear that wail of the Emergency Wagon. However, I am also going to make a friend of being in a constant state of emergency: no more hiding in the crowd, staying underground, struggling against my universal push to birth something new into the world.
It’s just what I have to do. Well, that and bubble baths.
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