By Betsy Gonwa, 
“Hi Grandma!” booms Anastasia’s voice through the speaker on my phone. “I’m upside down!”
“I see!” I reply, as I identify her face above her hair streaming onto the rug beneath her. And then, I ask, “Are you doing a back bend?”
She is too absorbed in her acrobatics to answer.
“Oh, I see,” I say, “you’re arched over the balance ball.”
“The big blue ball!” She replies.
On the floor in front of her rests her tray of magnetic alphabet letters. She reaches for it. I am doubtful about how we will proceed, but with Anastasia, I have learned to go with the flow. Sometimes we make words with her magnetic letters, sometimes we identify the sounds that go with the letters, sometimes we talk about what she is eating for breakfast and what alphabet letter “bagel” or “oatmeal” might start with, sometimes she “reads” the pictures from Bears in the Night. Every day is different.
So, when I hear the words big and blue and ball, I say, “You know those words! You wrote ball yesterday, remember?
She flips over to her stomach and moves aside a book that is resting on top of her word tray. “The words are still there, Grandma! See? Rainbow ball,” she reads, her fingers touching the red and blue letters on the tray.
“Do you want to write big blue ball?” I ask, and so it goes. With her tummy on the balance ball, she manipulates the letters with as much dexterity and ease as she does when we have our lessons at the table. Part way through, she has run out of the letter “b.” I suggest that perhaps she can use one of her word cards, and we go through them together. She finds on, up, little, go, car, and red. When she finds blue she shouts excitedly, “Blue!”
She still has not found big when our time is up, and the Zoom call ends.
Later that morning, I am listening to a directee. She isn’t feeling as connected to God as she wants to. She believes it might be because she doesn’t have a daily spiritual practice. “Some days I don’t even have a spiritual practice!” she says, and I hear judgment and disappointment in her voice.
I have felt distant too. I have believed that my time with the Holy One must involve being quiet or being still, or that it should be at the same time every day. But I have learned that these notions of how I must be in order to invite the Divine in are just that, notions.
My relationship with Divine Presence depends on my willingness to be open and to invite. I don’t have to wait until I’ve stopped moving. Like my granddaughter Zooming me from her upside-down perch on a balance ball, completely confident that her orientation makes no difference, so can we invite the Holy One into the moments of our days, even when our circumstances have turned us inside out or upside down.
The conversation with my directee moves along these lines. By the end of the session, she is no longer wishing for a more regular schedule to her days. Instead, she is looking at how she can invite the Spirit into her life as it is. As we sit together in the silence of a contemplative pause, I notice that she is looking more peaceful than before, and when she speaks, I hear a sense of triumph in her voice. “Tomorrow,” she says, “I am going to make cookies. And,” she continues as a smile spreads over her face, “I am going to invite God to bake with me.”
What about you? Can you trust that the Divine is present in the moments of your days?
