Tara Owens is a beloved granddaughter, daughter, wife, step-mom and soon-to-be grandmother and aunt. A spiritual director who speaks, writes and leads retreats, she’s learning to live into enough and out of productivity and perfectionism. She loves good poetry, the Colorado rockies, watching her husband cook and her rescue dog Baloo. She’s at work on an upcoming book in InterVarsity Press’s Formatio line on spirituality and the body.
Inheritance, obsolescence, growth, change—these ideas have been haunting me over the past few weeks. This haunting—and the slow but difficult revelations that have come with that haunting—started when I was sick with the stomach flu. While struggling to feel even remotely human, I got a phone call from my sister telling me that my maternal grandmother had been found unresponsive in her home. She was in tears and on her way to the hospital, her husband at the wheel. I couldn’t be there, couldn’t even think about being there, and it tore me to pieces. As I lay helpless and wondering if I’d ever hear my grandmother’s voice again, ever feel her hand press against mind or see her smile as she repeated the story of The Two of Us and The Plasticine, I began thinking about the gifts she has given me. My inheritance.
And there it was. Inheritance. It’s not a word that we think about much in modern contexts. No longer obsessed by lineage and taxed deeply on property that moves from one generation to the next, society actively discourages us from passing things on. We’re obsessed by things that don’t last, rather than by things that do. (iPad HD, anyone?) We get our hands on the “latest” technology only long enough for it to become obsolete, and we don’t think about what this is doing to us.
I’m a self-professed technogeek. I’ve always been on the edge of what’s current in communication and its tools. Heck, I was BBSing back in high school, which, for those of you who don’t know, was blogging before blogs existed, Facebook before Zuckerburg imagined it. Raised in an international immigrant family, I’ve never been afraid to get up and move, to try something new, to took toward the horizon.
And move, I have. Southern Ontario, North Carolina, the Greater Toronto area, Washington, DC, Northern Virginia and now Colorado are all places I’ve called home at one point or another. Each has marked me in specific and indelible ways, shaping me. I can’t say that each place engendered growth in me, but I was changed.
To this day, I’ve never lived in one location for more than six years. I like to think that I come by this ability to uproot myself regularly and still survive the transplant honestly. My Granny has lived in more than 10 countries, having given birth in five of them. Uganda, Seychelles, South Africa, England, Tanzania—her list shocked my rooted husband who, until his visit to Canada to meet my family, had never left the United States.
I like the fact that I’ve taken lived out Granny’s inheritance well. I am a woman willing to take risks, to change, to make a place for myself even when one isn’t readily offered to me.
What haunts me now is perhaps what is haunting my entire generation. I don’t have a good grasp on how to grow without change.
When my sister arrived at the hospital, she wasn’t allowed to see Granny. She had to wait, as I did thousands of miles away, until they had figured out what had happened. It was hours before they announced that my vibrant, cheeky 88-year old grandmother suffered a massive stroke. Moyra Eleanor went from living independently, visiting sick members of her congregation in nursing homes to immobility in a hospital bed, unable to communicate or move her left side. As nearby family—all five of her grown children—rushed to her side, I realized I’d only lived half of her legacy, only allowed her to give me half of what I stood to gain from the riches that she so freely lived.
I realized that I’d taken my inheritance and run for a foreign country (both literally and figuratively). It’s a country steeped in fast living, things to which I could easily prostitute my soul. I haven’t been living with the pigs, but I’ve been darn close.
I’ve never thought of myself as the prodigal, although I’m sure my immediate family would disagree. My tendency toward a life of change wasn’t something that I consciously chose, nor is it something that I see as necessarily detrimental. But being unable to talk to or offer anything to grandmother as she (and my family) live into her new, limited reality brought me up short.
Over the past ten years, my whole extended family has been quietly living a life of stability. While I wandered, they put down roots. While I sought change, they experienced growth.
I don’t deny that my years since college have been beneficial. I’ve learned incredible lessons, been given amazing gifts. It wasn’t until after college that I became a Christian, stumbling my way first to a renegade church then to seminary then to a practice as a spiritual director. But, until my marriage three years ago, I’ve been on move.
The year after I moved into our humble house in Colorado Springs, we built raised beds and planted a vegetable garden. I’d always professed to black thumbs, but I found that this new stability brought with it a little bit more patience and self-awareness. I was able to see that I watered a little too often, and then disappeared a little too long thinking that I’d done enough. I learned that uprooting things, even to move them to another area of the garden, leaves them weak and vulnerable to disease. I began to see that change isn’t always the thing that produces growth—sometimes it’s the very thing that stunts it.
The irony of this journey is that I’m beginning to root here, away from the family whose lessons I could have learned so much more quickly had I been willing to stay rather than go my own way. I’ve watched the tree outside my office window for three years now, and I am beginning to see how slow, stable growth produces change. After a lifetime of learning the lessons of change that forced me into growth—learning to make new friends quickly and with candor, choosing for self-confidence in new situations rather than self-doubt, recognizing and making room for the truth that change is first experienced as loss and making a companion my own grief—I’m beginning, oh so tentatively, to accept that there are lessons of growth that will produce change in me. And that’s harder to trust than I would like to think.
In two weeks, I’ll make the journey back to Canada. I hope and pray that I’ll get the opportunity to hold my Granny’s hand one more time. Without words, I’ll tell her that I’m ready to receive, to begin to receive the other part of my inheritance from her. I’ll tell her that I’m learning to settle, to grow where I am planted, even if it is far away from blood family. I’ll tell her that I’m beginning to see that what she’s given me is more than just an adventurous spirit, but a heart in need of the lessons of stability and belovedness. I’ll tell her—slowly, slowly—I’m coming home.
