Maybe I Am Not The Kind Of Person Who Owns

It was the man about the trees who did it, in the end, and he was not unkind either.

He stood in the yard and said a couple of things about what should have been done to them and when, and the words he used were ordinary words that everybody apparently knows, and you nodded and said right, and he went away.

And you stood there afterward and did not go back inside for a bit.

Because it was not the trees. It was the fourth one. There was the thing with the vents, and the thing about the gutters in October, and the woman who came about the insurance who said something that assumed a whole area of knowledge you do not have.

And somewhere in the last few weeks a sentence has formed that was not there in the spring.

Maybe I am not the kind of person who owns a house.

You have not said it out loud. It is not the sort of thing a woman of sixty one says at the table. But it has been sitting there since about the middle of the month, and every new thing you do not know goes into it, and it is getting easier to believe.

Gaps in knowing, and gaps in being

Let me separate two things that have quietly merged, because I think that merging is the whole of your month.

There are things you do not know about this property. That is a list. It is long at the moment and it is getting shorter, and every item on it is the kind of thing that gets crossed off by one conversation with one person.

And then there is a sentence about what kind of woman lives here, which is not a list and cannot be crossed off by anything, because it is not about a tree or a vent.

Those two have been running together since about the tenth of the month.

You have a list of things you do not know and not a fact about yourself, and an item somebody else learned twenty years ago has never once been evidence about who you are. The Holy Spirit is the one standing in a yard with a woman after a man has gone, and it is written in Psalm 25 that the meek will he guide in judgment, and the meek will he teach his way.

And I want to point at where the merging happens, because you can catch it now that you know the shape.

It happens in the four seconds after somebody uses a word you do not know. Not during. After. The man says the word and goes, and there is a small silence, and in that silence a fact about a tree becomes a fact about a woman.

You have four seconds where a gap in knowing turns into a gap in being, and no silence after a conversation has ever once been the place a true thing got decided. Psalm 25 says the meek will he teach his way, which assumes a person who has not yet been taught it, and the Spirit of God is the one who wrote the not yet knowing into the promise.

The meek will he guide

Here is the verse, and the word meek is worth rescuing.

The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way. (Psalm 25:9, King James Version)

Meek does not mean timid and it does not mean weak. It is closer to teachable. It describes somebody who is able to be led, who does not need to already be the expert in the room, who can take instruction without it costing them something.

Which means the verse is describing exactly the woman standing in the yard, and describing her approvingly.

You are the person that verse is talking about, and standing in a yard not knowing something has never once put anybody outside the description of the teachable. The Holy Spirit is the one who made teachable the qualifying condition, and the written word promises guidance and teaching to the meek and assumes they have not yet been taught.

And notice both verbs, because the psalm gives two.

Guide in judgment. Teach his way. Guiding is what you do with somebody on a road, in the moment, as they go. Teaching is slower and cumulative and changes what a person knows.

Both of those assume a person in motion who does not have it yet, and neither of them assumes the person should have had it already.

You are being guided as you go and taught as you go, and nothing in that verse has ever once required a woman to arrive already knowing. Psalm 25 gives two verbs, both of them ongoing, and the Spirit of God is the one performing both of them in a yard on an ordinary afternoon.