Abide

“The dude abides. I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ er easy for all us sinners.” -The Stranger (played by Sam Elliott) in the film, The Big Lebowski

“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit.” -John 15:4-5

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things. -Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu (Stephen Mitchell translation)

“ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

VLADIMIR: Yes, yes, we’re magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.” -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Abide (verb)
1 a : to bear patiently : TOLERATE

1 b: to endure without yielding : WITHSTAND

2 : to wait for : AWAIT

3 : to accept without objection

The Dude was right on. Sometimes, the best thing (and the only thing) you can do is to abide. I love this reflection from author Debie Thomas…

We are meant to be tangled up together. We are meant to live lives of profound interdependence, growing into, around, and out of each other. We cause pain and loss when we hold ourselves apart, because the fate of each individual branch affects the vine as a whole. In this metaphor, dependence is not a matter of personal morality or preference; it’s a matter of life and death…We have only one task: to abide. To tarry, to stay, to cling, to remain, to depend, to rely, to persevere, to commit. To hang in there for the long haul. To make ourselves at home…But “abide” is a tricky word. Passive on the one hand, and active on the other. To abide is to stay rooted in place. But it is also to grow and change. It’s a vulnerable-making verb: if we abide, we’ll get pruned. It’s a risky verb: if we abide, we’ll bear fruit that others will see and taste. It’s a humbling verb: if we abide, we’ll have to accept nourishment that is not of our own making. It’s a communal verb; if we abide, we will have to coexist with our fellow branches…The only true life we will live in this world is the life we consent to live in relationship, messy and entangled though it might be. The only fruit worth sharing with the world is the fruit we’ll produce together.