Tag: expression

The wonder of being here

Sometimes I’m drawn forward and sometimes I am turned to circle back, usually so I can pick something up I need to go forward. That’s an eyebrow-raising, quizzical-look statement, I know. Let’s try this:

This past weekend, I went for a run–my first run since early April. It was slow, but it didn’t matter–the smile on my face running through John Ford Park, saying good morning to folks I encountered, feeling air in my lungs and my feet in motion, even if stumbling slowly, was something I have been missing.

Running, skateboarding, and writing are three life-giving activities I discovered in my early teens that sustain and stoke me in my early 50s. There is a thread that connects them.


I’ve been reading Mark Nepo’s book, “Drinking from the River of Light: the Life of Expression,” which I take in small bites, so I can savor it and let is wash over me. Nepo circled me back to one of my favorite writers, poet William Stafford, by sharing and talking about Stafford’s poem, “The Way It Is”–

“There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.“

Nepo writes, “To discover the thread that goes through everything is the main reason to listen, express, and write… I began to realize that listening, expressing, and writing are the means by which we stay clear, the inner practices by which we realize our connection to other souls and a living Universe.” Then he invites us to think about, write about, and try to discern what that thread is for us, individually. What is the constant that is with you, through joy, pain, sadness, lows, highs, that makes you, you?

As I sat there, coffee, sunlight, and summer-breeze-fueled, scratching out a few notes, the thing that hit me was: a sense of wonder. That’s the thread. From marveling at honeysuckle and marsh grasses in the neighborhood as a kid, to Morning Glories and Great Blue Herons as an adult, a childlike sense of wonder has underpinned it all.

Nepo is a writer I’ve just found. He circled me back to Stafford and a poem I’ve been reading for years–something I needed to pick back up to move forward with new eyes.

Running, skateboarding, and writing have been wonder-stokers for me all along. Somehow they have distilled over time to where the wonder is there now as soon as I step on a board, pick up a pen, or put running shoe to pavement.


Yesterday morning, Landy Cook and I met at the Oxford Conservation Park to start the week off with a sunrise longboarding adventure. The sun was smiling with us and lent its rays to every moment and every photo. It was a morning to catch up, to laugh, to skate, to enjoy the moments, to breathe in the day. It’s a place we skate frequently, it’s not new scenery, but every morning is its own, there is always something new or different to catch, to appreciate, to be grateful for.

For me, part of those experiences, those moments, of being given a gift, is wanting to communicate it, to share it, maybe if I am lucky to wake something up for someone else, to connect in some way.

Nepo says it: “listening, expressing, and writing are the means by which we stay clear, the inner practices by which we realize our connection to other souls and a living Universe.” That’s what writing brings to my aesthetic and Spirit-filled table. Even rolling on a skateboard, I make sure to have a pocket notebook and pen to try to catch something of the wonder of the experience.


A couple weeks ago I was sent back to another favorite writer, John O’Donohue. Last summer we led a small group discussing his book, “Anam Cara.” A friend from church continues to read and reflect on it regularly and he wanted to pass along a copy to someone who is going through profound loss, hoping it might give them something to latch onto–perspective, compassion, care, connection, hope.

The class last summer was right around this time of year and a memory, a quote from “Anam Cara” circled its way back in front of me. It’s a thought that struck me as something Holly has been working through after coming back from a 12-day mission trip to Amazon river villages in Peru, where the life of the villagers was deliberate, present, and connected to the days and nights, the land, and each other. O’Donohue wrote:

“It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.”

The miracle, the wonder, of being here. That’s our connection to each other, other living souls, to God, to the living Universe; whether we are in Peru, the backyard, or skateboarding with the sunrise.

What we do with our lives

Let’s begin with intention. This is a blessing/prayer shared by Rev. Susie Leight:

Been praying this on repeat for the last few weeks…trying to utter it before my feet hit the floor (if I’m awake enough) …thought it would be a good one to share again…

May I…may you…may we…❤️

May I live this day
Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.

–from Matins, by John O’Donohue

What we do with our time, how we spend our days, months, years, lives is who we are to those we encounter. Our inward lives of thoughts, dreams, desires, may be infinite, but our worldly lives are the result of our time and actions.

Part Four of John O’Donohue’s book “Anam Cara,” looks at “Work as a Poetics of Growth.” The work that we do in the world helps shape us, helps us grow.

Thinking about this chapter, two quotes that come up a lot for me came to mind. The first is by writer Annie Dillard, who said:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And the second is by poet Mary Oliver, who wrote:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one precious life?”

How we use our time matters. It is so easy to let one day run into the next without thinking about it, but when these days string together, they can become large stretches of our lives if we don’t pay attention.

O’Donohue writes:

“Everything alive is in movement. This movement we call growth. The most exciting form of growth is not mere physical growth but the inner growth of one’s soul and life. It is here that the holy longing within the heart brings one’s life into motion. The deepest wish of the heart is that this motion does not remain broken or jagged but develops sufficient fluency to become the rhythm of one’s life.”

In the preceding chapters, he has taken us through our senses, our interior lives, our solitude, and now he is pointing out that these interior lives, our thoughts, dreams, and gifts, want to be brought into motion in our outward lives. It’s not enough to have them swirling around within us, we have to find a way to give them expression.

This is our work.

But in our society, there is a bit of a rub. Let’s think about what happens when we meet someone. We say ‘Hello, how are you?’, we make some small talk, and often the next question is ‘What do you do?’ Generally speaking we mean, what do you do for a living, what is your job?

If you feel like your job is a good reflection of your life, or points in the direction of who you are, then that is great. But if you don’t, how much better do we know someone, or do they know us by knowing what job we do?

Maybe you work construction, but your passion is being on the water fishing. Maybe you work an office job, but the thing you most look forward to is tutoring or coaching kids. Maybe you are a server, but you get home and paint or write or garden or have some way to express your creativity.

Our work is bigger than our day or night jobs. O’Donohue writes about a gravestone in London:

“Here lies Jeremy Brown born a man and died a grocer.” Often people’s identities, that wild inner complexity of soul and color of spirit, become shrunken to their work identities.”

This takes nothing away from our work identities, which can be life affirming. If people think of your kindness, your smile, your creativity and talent and know you as a teacher, a landscaper, a bartender, a boat builder, a painter, then that is a wonderful thing. But we are more than our professions–we are also sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, partners, etc.

Part of the problem, O’Donohue poses, is that we get stuck looking at life, jobs, the world around us in one particular way and that can become limiting. He suggests that we visualize the mind as a tower of windows that we are looking out.

“Sadly, many people remain trapped at the one window, looking out every day at the same scene in the same way. Real growth is experienced when you draw back from that one window, turn, and walk around the inner tower of the soul and see all the different windows that greet your gaze. Through these different windows, you see new vistas of possibility, presence, and creativity.”

In the last chapter we discussed that how we look at things determines what we see, what we find. In that same way, looking at things, including our work and our lives, in different ways can be so important.

Each day brings us new opportunities.

I recently got to be the grunt labor, branch-hauler for a tree expert friend who helped me cut up a downed branch that reached over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Listening to him talk about his love for trees and hearing his knowledge, then watching him work chainsaws and pole-saws like an artist, I knew I was watching someone do the thing they were created to do. It was a joyful and awe-inspiring experience. I’ve felt the same thing when I was a line cook watching an incredible chef do what they do. I’ve seen it in gardeners, teachers, preachers, and watermen. I’ve experienced it being around parents and grandparents, around birdwatchers, and skateboarders. I’ve seen it in a friend listening intently to someone sharing something that was big for them.

When we witness or experience those moments of calling, meaning, and connection, time moves differently.

Do we make time to do the things we love? Do we find ways to express our inner-longings in our daily lives? If we don’t, what will our lives become?

“In order to feel real. we need to bring that inner invisible world to expression.”

We want to seen, known, valued for who we are. In order for people to know us in that way, we have to find a way to express who we are in our lives. If we aren’t doing that, people can’t know us and we can feel frustrated that we aren’t finding a way to express ourselves. It can’t stay inside us. O’Donohue points out that if we want to change our lives, until it enters the practices of our days, it is all talk.

Work is maybe a misleading word here. O’Donohue also talks about the danger of productivity becoming God, which reduces each individual to a function. He talks about needing to think less about competition and more about working together. And he talks about the danger of reducing time to an achievement, when time should also be for wonder and creativity.

On Monday (August 15), the same day our class met, Frederick Buechner died at 96 years old. Buechner has been one of the most influential writers, thinkers, and theologians in my own spiritual growth. And he has written a lot about vocation. Vocation might be a more complete word to use here instead of work. Buechner has called vocation, “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

That says so much, but Buechner explained a bit more. He points out that vocation as a word comes from:

“Vocare, to call, of course, and a person’s vocation is a person’s calling. It is the work that they are called to in this world, the thing they are summoned to spend their life doing. We can speak of a person choosing their vocation, but perhaps it is at least as accurate to speak of a vocation’s choosing a person, of a call’s being given and a person hearing it, or not hearing it. And maybe that is the place to start: the business of listening and hearing. A person’s life is full of all sorts of voices calling them in all sorts of directions. Some of them are voices from inside and some of them are voices from outside. The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives are. Which do we listen to? What kind of voice do we listen for?

Vocation. Listening and hearing. Where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

Our friend and brother Bruce Richards recently died. He spent his professional career as a pilot–in the Air Force during Vietnam, then as a commercial pilot. He was retired when he moved to Easton; he came to Christ Church Easton to buy a crab cake during the Waterfowl Festival and for the next 18 years helped create a new caregiving ministry, took Communion to nursing homes, and was an inspiration and loving friend to everyone he encountered. He was living out a vocation.

Bruce worked closely with Carol Callaghan, who was a mentor to him and to so many people. Carol was a school teacher who found and felt a calling to ordination later in her life and became the first woman ordained as a Deacon at Christ Church Easton. Carol paved the way for Rev. Barbara Coleman, Rev. Susie Leight, and those of us who are now discerning and following a path that may lead to that same place.

Like Bruce and Carol, may we all find a calling, a vocation that speaks to our inner longing; that connects us to God; and that inspires and encourages others to live lives of love, creativity, and service.

Let’s close with O’Donohue’s blessing at the end of the chapter:

May the light of your soul guide you.
May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart.
May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.
May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work.
May your work never weary you.
May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration, and excitement.
May you be present in what you do.
May you never become lost in the bland absences.
May the day never burden.
May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises.
May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.
May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected.
May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

Amen.