Mary's World

Art by Rebecca J. Hartman

On Mondays and Fridays, from 11:00 until just before noon, I live in Mary’s world, and here I experience the safest, most consistent, most predictable minutes of the week.

Everyone is equal in Mary’s world. No counterfeit acceptance, no impatience with those who are slower or fall behind. Mary has a grace that emanates from some core level: “Just do what you can do; we all sway and lose balance,” she says.

She knows everyone’s name in class, and I imagine she does in every class she teaches. If I look for her online, I find she volunteers at the Humane Shelter Fall Festival Booth, is part of a folk-dance club, and has retired from the corporate world. I know she often rides her bicycle instead of driving and responds to every comment in the group, no matter how off-the-wall, with the same gentle smile or laughter of camaraderie, as if to say ‘we’re all in this together.’

For more than ten years, I’ve quietly participated in her yoga class, and it’s a wonder that ten years ago she even knew who I was, but her name appeared in the memorial contributions when my son passed away—her own gift and a corporate match. When I could manage to respond, I placed a bunch of tulips on her mat one day and left it at that, but what I was saying is ‘your presence is transformative. You are a role model and an anchor,’ and how do you achieve that with folks you hardly know?

I think we rarely understand the impact our being in this world has on others. And I have a theory that people as soothing and grounded as Mary Engelland are tethered with a cord that leads from deep inside to someplace else, the way Emerson said we could link into the universal, like a lifeline. I don’t know where the cord goes. I swear I don’t, but I’d like to go there, too, and I work on it a little every day.

Lately I’ve been sidetracked by those who are the opposite of Mary, untethered—those swinging as wildly as a dervish whirls, knocking others about like so much collateral damage, dangerously unmoored.

That’s why every week I visit Mary’s world, the one where we’re all in this together, where if we lose balance, we don’t careen into one another with discourteous abandon.