Sarah’s Slice of Life: In the Moment
Summer is seen as a season of growth, an opportunity for the green things to flourish under the sun and for the flowers to fully unravel their petals.
Well, for me last summer, all the growth was an unfortunate form of mockery. I had just finished my junior year of college and, despite my best efforts, hadn’t secured a summer job or internship before summer actually arrived.
Maybe I was being too hard on myself, but it felt like a colossal failure. As those early summer days dripped by, I became disappointed even as the world around me continued to blossom and grow.
During this time, I would often walk down to the pond in our backyard and sit on its banks. I would watch the sun skate across its surface, noticing the reflections of the trees in the water were most clear in the early afternoon. For a few days, a cluster of lily pads drifted across the water near the shore, and dragonflies and bees would swoop close to them but never land.
All the beauty of those moments by the pond distracted me for a time, but my plight would always rise again like a mountain to cover me in its shadow.
I was stuck between two places, uncertain and unmoored, drifting like the lily pads. I was waiting for something intangible to materialize in front of me while pining for the life I had left behind. It turned me into a tight ball of worry and discomfort, and each present day became bland and frustrating.
Then, someone named Nightbirde came along.
Nightbirde is the stage name for Jane Marczewski, a singer-song writer who also happens to be a Liberty alumna (she graduated in 2013). She rose to fame when she received the Golden Buzzer on NBC’s talent show “America’s Got Talent” after singing her original song “It’s OK.” It sent her straight to the live shows of the competition and catapulted her into immediate stardom.
However, I knew of Marczewski long before the world saw her rise. When I attended an April CFAW my senior year of high school, she returned to her alma mater and opened for Tori Kelly. At that concert, I got to witness her genuine spirit and vivacious view of life. She had been battling cancer since 2017, but everything she said and did was with an authentic gratitude that defied her tragic circumstances. Despite it all, she lived fully engaged in the now, seeing the world through grateful and awe-struck eyes.
Marczewski passed away on Feb. 19, 2022, leaving behind a legacy of hope and bravery. I’ll never forget seeing her at that concert as she stood up on her piano bench and sang to the sky.
A few months after she passed, her family posted a part of her unreleased poem called “A place called here” on Instagram. Her words were what I read during one moment by the pond.
“But here I am in this desert,” she writes. “Between two oases / Thirsty, but not realizing that here is somewhere worth / being / Somewhere worth seeing.”
If anyone had the right to be upset by present circumstances, it was Marczewski. Instead, she chose to fully live in the here and now, accepting present days like they were actual gifts.
After reading her words about the beauty of “a place called here,” my perspective shifted. Yes, I was still waiting for something, and I still missed what I had left behind, but my here and now was still beautiful even if it was full of ordinary things.
Sometimes, we may see ordinary life as mundane because we’re waiting for something more exciting to come along. There’s nothing wrong with hoping, but we shouldn’t let the hope of the future blind us to the vivacity of the now.
Marczewski understood this, and she reveals her gratitude for ordinary things in her blog post “God is on the Bathroom Floor.”
“I see mercy in the dusty sunlight that outlines the trees, in my mother’s crooked hands, in the blanket my friend left for me, in the harmony of the wind chimes,” she writes. “And I learn a new prayer: thank you. It’s a prayer I don’t mean yet, but will repeat until I do.”
Tate is the Editor-in-Chief for the Liberty Champion. Follow her on Twitter
