Treasure is time plus experience yielding gratitude and wonder. Finding sea glass is the same as skipping shells.
If your mind and body are tuned to a task, you are the moment.
“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” I carry that Annie Dillard quote in my soul, the reminder of a feeling that has always been there.
Unplugged.
Astonished.
Around the world in a 20-minute drive and a short walk across the cosmos.
Holly reads Mary Oliver out loud:
“I have become older, and, cherishing what I have learned, I have become younger.”
Jim Harrison writes like he is reckoning with life, death, love, God–you name it. He writes like his life is on the line, his soul is trying to come out through language–that’s how much is at stake.
His “Essential Poems” book frequently travels with me. This morning it was:
“The stillness of this earth which we pass through with the precise speed of our dreams.”
that washed over me, from Harrison’s poem, “Returning to Earth.”
“I Believe” is a manifesto of things in the world that he puts faith in.
Steep drop-offs, empty swimming pools, raw garlic, used tires, abandoned farmhouses, leaky wooden boats, turbulent rivers, the primrose growing out of a cow skull. What a list! These are things I know I believe in as I read his list because each thing comes powerfully to mind–smells, pictures, feelings. This is a list of beliefs that come from experience and hard-nosed reflection. Everything on it has passed the test.
Reading Harrison calls me to write things that absolutely have to be said–something relevant, something that is working on me and that has to come out or risk burning my soul, not an academic or intellectual game, not something that sounds nice or clever–something that comes out of an ongoing wrestling match or dance or conversation with the Spirit.
This a Mark year for the prescribed church readings–most of the Gospel readings this year come from Mark’s account of the good news. For Palm Sunday our in-person services did a dramatic reading of Mark’s account of the Passion (Last Supper, betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, death and burial–the suffering) of Jesus, with readers playing different parts. On our Zoom service, we divided up the reading between a few of us. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest of the four, the writer doesn’t add fluff or niceties, there is no birth narrative, no Christmas, and the account ends with women running bewildered from an empty tomb. Reading Mark’s Passion account, he doesn’t stop to answer questions, he leaves those up to us to ask, wrestle with, and answer.
I think the writer of Mark and Jim Harrison would get along. Both of them had stories they had to tell. Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, is full of those kind of Jesus stories. It moves me more than any other week of the church calendar. This Friday evening, Good Friday, we will have a service built around the seven different last words/phrases attributed to Jesus in the different Gospel accounts of his death. Then someone will respond–something spoken, read, sung–hopefully pulling those in attendance into the story.
The Gospel writers chose to write down a story that was being told orally, for fear of losing it. They knew it was too big to risk letting it go. And each of them went about it a bit differently, each giving something of themselves and their reckoning with the good news and the Spirit.
When I read Harrison’s poetry, I know that what he is saying is vital to who he was. It conveys what he loved, what he struggled with, what he laughed at, what he cried over, and what lit up his sense of wonder; the curiosity that was in his bones. He was a rough outdoorsman who lived on a farm in Michigan near where he was born. He fished, he ate, he drank, he traveled–he lived.
I hope I can find the words, the pictures, the moments in my life where I connect to love, to wonder, to Creation, to God and to the story of God and humanity that is unfolding through all of us and transform and transmute it all through the right words.
I hope you find your own moments and experiences and transform them into your own art–whether dance, song, painting, poem, carving, or your life itself as a work of art. God is a creator and we, in God’s image, are also meant to create.
One of my favorite lines of writing comes from the beginning of a Harrison poem called “Tomorrow,” where he talks about being blindsided by a new kind of wonder, the kind we haven’t experienced before. He writes:
“I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don’t know what”
The stars or the sunrise or sunset reflecting off the river; the smell and feeling of earned sweat; how excited your dog is when you walk in the door; a book you can’t put down or stop thinking about; the first sip of coffee or tea in the morning; jumping in the river, lake, or ocean when it’s colder than you expect; the memory of someone who shaped you; a conversation with someone you love when you don’t know what either of you will say next; an answered prayer; exploring somewhere you’ve never been; sacrificing something important for someone else–someone else sacrificing something important for you; knowing in your heart, soul, and bones that you are loved.
I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don’t. know. what. And I believe.
I am rarely without a notebook and pen. It would be fair for me to wear a sign on my back that says, “Will stop to write.” Mostly because otherwise I will forget. I will stop my longboard if a compelling thought jumps into my mind. And I frequently sit along a shoreline, in the woods, on a bench or wherever to take notes.
When it comes to church, for the readings and the sermon, I often just have pen and paper at the ready.
These are notes and thoughts after sermons and discussion last weekend at Christ Church Easton.
Last weekend’s lectionary readings were Isaiah 11:1-10 (The Peaceful Kingdom) and Matthew 3:1-12 (The Proclamation of John the Baptist). They will both speak to you if you let them.
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
Isaiah 11:1-3
On our Sunday morning Zoom discussion, Fr. Bill Ortt unpacked the Isaiah reading.
Wisdom happens in the heart and soul. Understanding takes place in the mind.
Fr. Bill Ortt
That’s one to sit with. We comprehend things with our mind, but when something sinks into our soul, it changes us.
And as we got talking about how to take “the fear of the Lord,” Fr. Bill talked about the ocean–how it deserves reverence and respect; how it leaves us humbled and in awe when we think about its size and power.
My mind went to the stars. When I stare at a clear night sky and try to think about the distance and time that is between us and God’s artwork across the cosmos; if I see a shooting star or the recent eclipse, my sense of awe and wonder is beyond stoked.
In verses 6-10, Isaiah goes on to describe what the coming peaceful kingdom might be like:
The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. 9 They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
This whole section is filled with hope for a people that need it. Maybe with what the world we live in feels like, looking forward with hope for a time to come might do us some good.
In Matthew’s Gospel, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness. He looks crazy, wearing camel-hair clothing and a leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey. He tells people to change their lives, to live differently.
The kind of wilderness they talk about in the Bible is not a place we want to be. Wilderness experiences are those times we feel alone, lost, stripped down, exhausted, confused.
We talked about the need for recognizing those times in the wilderness, those times of desperation.
“Sometimes we go into the wilderness, but sometimes the wilderness comes to us.”
That was a comment made in our Zoom discussion. There is a lot of truth to that. Being aware of the wilderness, even if we don’t feel that’s where we are, can be a saving grace.
Wilderness changes us. It can make us wiser. It can help us understand what other people are going through. It can wake up our compassion. When we come out of the wilderness renewed, we want to be people who help others who are struggling to make it through.
Towards the end of Fr. Bill’s sermon in the church on Sunday morning, he tied it together:
“We need to know what it means to be people who have been healed, forgiven, and renewed.”
“When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging.”
John O’Donohue, “Anam Cara”
Loneliness and solitude are not the same. When we feel alone, we feel cut off, isolated, disconnected. Solitude gives us a chance to go beneath the surface noise of our lives and spend time getting to know our souls. Solitude can help us feel connected.
This week I was talking to a friend who is reading “Anam Cara” alongside our study at Christ Church Easton, though his schedule doesn’t allow him to make the classes. Our brief conversation meandered all over the place and as we went our separate ways I said that I hoped he was enjoying and getting something out of the book.
“You know what it gives me: music for my soul.”
Amen. May we all find music for our souls each day, and for those reading “Anam Cara,” may it add soul music to your days.
Section 3, “Solitude is Luminous,” is the halfway point in our study. John O’Donohue has contemplated the mystery of friendship (Section 1), and pointed out the infinity of our interiority and how our senses are our gateways to the world around us and to each other (Section 2). And now he shows us the need for us to go inside, to embrace solitude so that we can know our true selves, our gifts, what makes us who we are, so that we can be of benefit to others and to the world.
If all we do is follow the world and go wherever the figurative wind blows us, and we never get to know our passions, desires, gifts–our best selves, who God created us to be–what can we really offer anyone else in friendship?
“It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that brought you here. When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive. Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity.”
I am going to string a series of connected quotes here, one leading to another, because O’Donohue makes his points beautifully:
“When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure, and wonder.”
Spending time in solitude is not some navel gazing, narcissistic indulgence, it actually helps us be better friends, partners, parents, better people.
“There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you can learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find.”
This is such an important thing to get across: how we look at things determines what we see. The lens, the eyes we use to look at the world shape/color what we see. And the same goes with how we look at ourselves. We are here in this life for the time that we have, treating ourselves gently and creatively and getting to know our souls and what we bring to the table is so important to what we make of our lives.
If you follow the idea that loving our neighbors as ourselves should be one of the top priorities of our lives, then it matters how we relate to ourselves. If we are miserable people who don’t know ourselves, where does that leave us with our neighbors?
O’Donohue goes on to warn us of the danger of “the unlived life.” He says, “We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.”
If you come to “Anam Cara” with a lens to Scripture, you might hear echoes of the Gospel of John:
“The thief comes to kill and destroy, I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.”
John 10:10 (NIV)
If we live our lives to the full, we help others to do the same. That’s what God wants for us, for humanity, for all of Creation. That’s what we should be working towards, hoping for, searching for, praying for.
This week, Rev. Susie Leight shared the following photo and connected reflection from O’Donohue:
I arise today
In the name of Silence Womb of the Word, In the name of Stillness Home of Belonging, In the name of the Solitude Of the Soul and the Earth.
I arise today
From Matins, by John O’Donohue
As we rise today, as we arise, may we look inside so that we can be the best versions of ourselves for those we encounter.
As we go through our days, may we find and appreciate music for our souls, and may we help provide and encourage soul music in others.
Through the noise and stress and worry of the world going on around us, may we make time to look deeper and see that “there is something beautiful, good, and eternal happening.”
Beginning today with the “Blessing of Solitude” with which O’Donohue closes his chapter, may we recognize, realize, and learn to see ourselves like this.
We need our sense of awe, of wonder, kickstarted. When I look at any given week ahead, at the to-do list, at the bills, at the schedule, it’s easy to get lost in the details.
Everyone has a soapbox they frequently stand on. Wonder is one of my few soapboxes. Carl Sagan gets it. Let Carl get you going. When he says dot, he means the Earth:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
That’s the kind of perspective I need from time to time. The history of humankind–our dreams, accomplishments, stories, are all a speck in the cosmos. Get your head into the stars.
What are your go-to activities, places, or ways to amp up your sense of wonder and awe? For me, getting outside is as big as it gets. Watching the sun come up or set on a river, bay, ocean; hiking, trail running, skateboarding; gardening where I take the time to look at the details of what is growing or blooming. And obviously, books.
Some wonder-sparking books that were nearby while I was typing.
Here’s a thought from Pablo Neruda:
“We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones, knowing they will go on, inert or burning, and I was discovering, naming all the these things: it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.”
Again with our brief time here, the span of time before and after us, and yet, there are times when we can feel connected to, a part of everything around us.
Let’s play that out. We are here. We were created. You and I have consciousness and questions and feelings. So the same Creator that made all of the wonder-filled, awe-stoking Universe, made you and made me.
“The story of our faith beings with the Creation narratives, in which the act of Creation itself becomes the unfolding of God’s love for the whole world.
God’s love is written all over creation. It begins when God takes the deep and the darkness and, instead of destroying these things, makes them a part of creation. God calls it very good, and we are all created together by a loving God who destroys nothing in creating–deep and darkness, earth and light, knit together in a creation that is both unified and diverse…
Nature is sacred; it was made by the same creator who made us. If we want to love, worship, and be with God, then it makes sense for us to stand in the midst of creation. The closer we are to nature, the nearer we most be to the heart and desire of the Creator.”
Let that wash over you for a minute. That sense of awe and wonder in us, that connection to the larger Universe, to creation, can be a means for us to get to know God and draw closer to Him. Even if we are a blip on the screen, we are still a part of it and we can do something with our time.
We were made to wonder. We were made to dream. We were made to enjoy and take part of the beauty of the Creation of which we are a part. And by doing so, we find ourselves a gateway to God.
Driving Trappe backroads I had to stop the car on a small bridge, mid-conversation, just to take in the scene. To recognize and capture the moment: the mist on the river, the slick calm surface of the water, the way the sun froze everything in time, just for a second.
“… After the kingfisher’s wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.”
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, “Four Quartets”
That’s how Eliot puts those iridescent moments–they can become the still point of a turning world. If there are a handful of books that we get sent back to over and over again in the course of our lives, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is one of those books for me.
This weekend it was Rowan Williams’ book “Being Disciples,” that sent me either down the chute or up the ladder to the kingfisher’s wing. Williams compared prayer to birdwatching (two things I dig and want to spend more time doing). He said:
“I’ve always loved that image of prayer as birdwatching. You sit very still because something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes of course it means a long day of sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening. I suspect that, for most of us, a lot of our experience is precisely that. But the odd occasions when you do see what T.S. Eliot (in section IV of ‘Burnt Norton’) called ‘the kingfisher’s wing’ flashing ‘light to light’ make it all worthwhile. And I think that living in this sort of expectancy–living in awareness, your eyes sufficiently open and your mind both relaxed and attentive enough to see when it happens–is basic to discipleship.”
And that’s it–having our minds and hearts open and expectant, so that we can catch those moments when they happen. Eliot pointed it out for me years ago, Williams reminded me and sent me back to Eliot, but God presents us with those moments every day.
Running through John Ford Park on a Friday morning after a Thursday night rain, and a magnolia blossom all but audibly called out to be noticed and appreciated. It’s so easy to put my head down and pass those moments by, but thankfully I am easily led when it comes to opportunities to marvel and wonder.
Another one of those books to return to countless times over a lifetime is Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” particularly “Song of Myself.”
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth”
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Have you had those feelings, possibly brought on by those kingfishers’ wing moments that we happen to catch? When you are sitting there, drinking in the day, firehose style, where you know you are missing a lot of what you are trying to take in, and you breathe, and look over and the moment transforms into a feeling and you are in it and it is in you.
Loneliness hits us all. So do suffering, loss, and pain. Hopefully so do joy, wonder, and love. But it’s easy to feel like we’re on an island. And then something happens, when maybe just for a moment, we find a connection. Someone says something or we read something and it washes over us–someone else feels that way, or ‘yes, that’s it–that’s the feeling!’ or ‘I can’t believe someone else thinks that!’
So often it’s language that connects us. It gives words to our feelings, our thoughts, our pain, our joy, our curiosity. If you are like me, that’s a feeling I get from reading, and from some writers and poets more than others.
I knew what my first tattoo was going to be the first day we studied William Blake in Dr. Gillin’s British Romanticism class at Washington College. I was 24 years old and we were discussing Blake’s poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” It’s a big, unwieldy, hard to get your head around, free form puzzle on first glance and I remember thinking that I didn’t know you could do that in poetry. This morning, looking over different sections of “Proverbs of Hell,” I got that awestruck feeling all over again. Here are some dropped in at random:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
They are like hand grenades that go off in your mind. He changed what I thought you could do with writing. He spoke things that I hadn’t yet found words for. And now I carry around his engraving “The Ancient of Days” (at the top of the page) on my left shoulder. I remember Dr. Gillin talking about the art saying it was God creating order in the universe.
In that same class we encountered William Wordsworth. And he is a poet who wrote about connected to nature and wonder the way I felt and thought about them. I can’t tell you how many times I have read, quoted, and contemplated his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
This past fall I had coffee with friend and mentor John Miller. John has been a long-time instructor at Chesapeake Forum, dating back to when it began as “The Academy for Lifelong Learning” at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, where we worked together.
John and I have gotten together for coffee and to talk literature and life over the past couple years, including talking about the passing and great memories of our friend, former co-worker, and John’s co-leader in countless literature classes, John Ford.
As we sat outside along the street in September, John Miller had something on his mind. He started reading aloud from John Milton’s elegy “Lycidas,” in which Milton mourns the drowning of a friend, class mate, and fellow poet and wonders about his own mortality and if our struggle is all worth it.
And the thing we kept coming back to was the way language, the way poetry, can give voice to all the things we feel and think and encounter in this business of being human. The power of language to help us get our heads and hearts around being human.
And Blake and Wordsworth were two other poets who came up in the discussion. And we went back and forth over e-mail and phone calls and what we have coming up over three Zoom sessions on Thursdays, January 27, February 3 and 10, from 10:00 to 11:30am is Milton, Blake and Wordsworth: On Being Human.
This is not an academic study of poetry. This is a look at how poetry can give us the words to help us connect to each other; to help us make some kind of sense of what it is to live a life, to grieve, to see into the heart of things; to connect to God through nature.
I go back to a line that Robin Williams delivers as John Keating, the English teacher in Dead Poets Society:
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
I have held that notion to be exactly so and tried to live my life, at least in part, along those lines.
And that’s the spirit we will approach Milton, Blake and Wordsworth with, as we discuss what it is to be human, and how language and poetry can connect us.
I love Shel Silverstein. I have never wanted to punch a character in a story more than the boy in his book, “The Giving Tree.” (as he gets older, not when he was a kid). I had a hard time reading it to the girls because the boy just takes and takes and blows off the tree, and never gets it. My blood is boiling a bit now just thinking about it. But Silverstein couldn’t describe humankind in our time any better.
I aspire to a more complementary relationship to the trees in my life (I get the irony of having a wooden skateboard in the photo). Over the past several years, a particular tree stands out. It’s an Osage Orange tree on the shoreline of the Oxford Cemetery. I have made a point of sitting under it for some time now.
Of late, rest has been hard to come by. At lease the right kind of rest. Rest, for me, is about tuning out the constant demands of what is coming up, and being completely in the moment. It’s when time doesn’t matter and actually passes differently. It’s not the kind of rest that comes from sitting on a couch or sleeping at night. Frequently, it comes from being outside–hiking, walking, skateboarding, reading, bird watching, exploring, kayaking, paddleboarding, reading or writing. I haven’t had enough of that time, those moments lately, and I can tell.
When I rest is when I am open to wonder. When I rest, gratitude overflows–in part because I am not rushing to the next thing. I am not in a hurry.
Thursday morning, I fought the pull of the couch and hit Oxford Conservation Park with longboard, binoculars, and notebook. “Skatebirding” has become a new favorite thing to do. I skated to the cemetery and pulled up under my “Sitting Tree.”
Double-drop longboards make for great birding seats. As I sat to clear my head, think, pray, and take in the morning, a raft of ducks was just off the shore. Watching them move about as a group, they were doing what ducks do. And what is it that people do in that way? What is it that is natural to us, that puts us in a place of doing what we should be doing?
Beyond Mallards, Canvasbacks, and Wood Ducks, I don’t know all the duck types around by first sight. Watching them and checking Cornell’s Merlin App, I pegged them as Ruddy Ducks, but pinged a birding expert friend to make sure. As I watched them, time moved differently. A solo Bufflehead swam up to the Ruddies a couple times, thinking they were his peeps, and then both times flew away skimming the water in a hurry when he realized they weren’t.
These are not my photos, they are from bird ID sites, but the top left is a Bufflehead and the others are male and female non-breeding Ruddy Ducks.
It was the tree, the ducks, the cove, the breeze, the sunrise, the shoreline, and I got to be a part of it. Sitting there, gratitude and joy welled up and started coming out of my eyes. I know I can’t communicate it, but maybe you’ve had moments like that.
Skating back to the conservation park, I wanted to write all this down–something I haven’t been doing enough of except chicken scratch in notebooks.
We’re looking headlong into the holidays. It’s a busy time of year, it’s nighttime dark at 5:30pm and it’s getting colder. Mornings like yesterday remind me that I need to rest. And to rest, I need to get outside. The Sitting Tree is still there. Where am I?
The Christmas story I re-read every year has firemen and a house fire, snowballs waiting for cats, mentions of wolves, postmen, a celluloid duck, and a possible ghost joining in for caroling. And it’s all true. Or at least remembered true.
Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is the kind of opening of nostalgic floodgates you expect from a poet’s vivid and quirky memory. And what he remembers aren’t gifts (those get a comic couple paragraphs) but the experiences he had, what he and his friends got into, uncles and aunts visiting, and what the town looked and felt like in the snow.
As Thomas and his friends walk in the snow along the shore, trying to decide what to get into, someone asks, “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?” Maybe those are the moments of true and honest friendship and the things we build our memories around.
Christmas is certainly a time when nostalgia hits us over the head like a cartoon wooden mallet, this year especially. I stumbled across this piece I scrawled out a couple years ago and if nostalgia is the path you want to run down, it might walk there with you. As I sit here with waves of Christmas memories crashing over me, I have written about for 30 or so and thought about Christmases past for maybe 45 years (the memories had to build up for the first three). I find myself coming back to the same thoughts, the same books, the same memories, and the same themes.
Clark Griswold understands the pressure of trying to create and re-create the perfect Christmas.
I’m thinking about the pressure we put on Christmas–finding and buying the perfect gifts, wanting to create the perfect memories for our families, wanting to get past the commercial and to the spiritual, communal aspects of Christmas. And I think about the fact that my Christmases as a kid are vivid memories, then not much to call up in my teens and 20s. Thinking about Christmases having young kids, crystalline again, and now the girls are well into their teens, into the age of unmemorable Christmases. And maybe I am caught in a place where the next memorable Christmas won’t be until there are young kids in the picture again (which I hope is a good ways off…).
But maybe that’s the key. Not young kids, but seeing things with eyes like that again. When he picks what memories to share, Dylan Thomas goes back to when he was a child. Because that’s where the vivid memories are; that’s where his eyes were fresh and impressionable. Maybe that’s what I/we need, especially during a pandemic year when I know my family won’t be gathering on Christmas Eve or Day.
“Jesus said, ‘Unless you change and become as little children, you will never see the kingdom of heaven’ (and thinking on a lecture he attended by Terry Holmes, Bishop Curry continues)… children have vivid and boundless imaginations. They dwell happily in that space between fantasy and reality. Theirs is often that land of the fairy tale, the cartoon. They fantasize, they imagine, they dream. I think Dr. Holmes was right. To behold the reign of God, the perfect realization of God’s peace, God’s shalom, God’s salaam–the dream of God–we must become as little children. We must imagine and… dream.”
I was talking to a friend recently about that exact thing, how Buddhists use the term “begininer’s mind” and Jesus talks about seeing with the eyes of a child. If re-think where I am right now and go back to my surroundings, I smell the evergreen/fir smell of the Christmas tree; I see the white lights on the tree that the girls asked for this year to replace the rainbow lights that I generally use to conjure up trees from my youth; I can smell and taste the coffee, which makes me think of my grandfather this time of year. I can see the cat and dog half-sleeping on the couch, waiting for movement toward the kitchen.
We’ve always got all the tools we need to build the perfect Christmas. If I choose to focus on sitting down to have a Sunday afternoon lunch with people I love rather than looking at what I find or don’t find shopping, I am creating the right kind of memories.
This isn’t a post about what Christmas is or what it means, but more about what lenses/eyes we use to approach the whole experience.
Our dog gets up and runs to the door or window every time the same neighbors walk by. It’s a new experience for her every time. Even she has the child-like enthusiasm and wonder idea down. I can learn from her example and reminder.
If I am open. If I see with the eyes, imagination, and wonder of a child. Maybe I won’t be stuck having a conversation with the ghost of Christmas past. Maybe I will be in the moment, caught up in wonder and conversation, and I can again ask questions like, “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?”
On any given day, my mind travels far more places than my body does. On the best days, both get to roam free and find beautiful places and experiences.
Yesterday was Saturday, a day that started in downpour and ended in sunshine. It was a typical day on the outside–I didn’t have a single in-person conversation with anyone, which isn’t unusual on weekends I don’t have the girls.
Saturdays start with coffee, reading, prayer, daydreams. When the rain let up, rescue dog Harper and I wandered around the yard a bit.
TANGENT 1 – BACKYARD PURPLE. If I don’t notice flowers, birds, and butterflies in my own backyard, how will I spot them anywhere else? I can’t count how many times I have walked out to the writing shed since our COVID-19 quarantine began. Each time I try to take in and appreciate something different. As we’ve discussed with Alice Walker, God gives us purple in our lives, it is up to us to notice it.
Three men who shaped the Black Panther. From left: Christopher Priest, whose epic and iconic run writing the Black Panther comic book made the character cool again; Chadwick Boseman, whose incredible on-screen performances brought T’Challa to life for all new audiences; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the powerhouse writer and thinker who currently writes Black Panther and who has elevated him even higher in cultural relevance.
TANGENT 2 – CHADWICK BOSEMAN/BLACK PANTHER. Friday night brought the sad news of Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman’s death from colon cancer at age 43. When actors, musicians, or athletes that we’ve never met die, maybe it shouldn’t feel like a big deal, but the ones who have touched our lives have real presence with us.
The three biggest common interests my daughters and I share are: Marvel movies, Washington Nationals baseball, and the show “The Office.” We’ve watched pretty well every Marvel movie together, multiple times, many in the theaters on their debuts. It’s a way I share my lifelong love of comic books and stories with them. More than any other Marvel movie to date, Black Panther was a cultural event. If you want to get a sense for why, check out this clip from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where they had Boseman surprise movie-goers who thought they were filming a video thanks to the actor. Boseman’s graciousness, humility, humor, and humanity off-screen, in his personal life made him every bit the king he portrayed on screen. Do yourself a favor and Google his name and watch clips and read articles.
Yesterday I spent time watching Marvel movies with Black Panther in them, as well as reading more of Christopher Priest’s character-resurrecting run, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s mythological and epic first arc.
TANGENT 3 – RUNNING IN THE RAIN. There are times when I have to let my body catch up to my brain. Early afternoon the rain had stopped for a bit, so I added a run to the day. As I started up Rails to Trails, about a mile in, the rain started again, first as a slow drizzle, building to an ever-present curtain, then to a downpour by the last half-mile of my 4.5 miles. There is a feeling that warm rain on a run on a hot day brings, that makes the run worth it just for that.
TANGENT 4 – MIND FOOD. I’m a believer in the notion that what we take in is what we put back out, and formative in who we become. If I read Scripture, imaginative, thought-provoking stories, poetry, cosmic graphic novels, world-building fiction; watch movies and documentaries that open my mind and heart and help me see and dream, maybe that is part of my path?
Krista Tippett, in her book “Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living,” reminds us that, “what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully.”
After running, it’s orange slices and water, it’s chopping peppers from the garden into tuna salad, and making time to read, to imagine, and to be still.
Tippett continues:
“I believe that mystery is a common human experience, like being born and falling in love and dying. A new openness to the language of mystery–and the kindred virtue of wondering–across boundaries of belief and non-belief, science and faith, is helping us inhabit our own truths and gifts exuberantly while honoring the reality of the other.”
I want to believe that. And I can see evidence in pockets, or more like veins running through rock, but there is a lot of rock too. Tippett published the book in 2016 and wasn’t looking at the nastiness and yelling and how divided people are right now. But maybe it’s times like now that we need to focus on the veins of hope and not the rock itself. Maybe now hope and love and mystery and wonder are everything, in part because of their scarcity on the national stage.
The apostle Paul wrote letters of encouragement and hope and thanksgiving from prison and gave shape and direction to a young church. He was looking forward. Poet Ross Gay, in his book “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” and poem of the same name, in giving thanks to different aspects of his life, looks back:
...thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land; thank you who did not bulldoze that ancient grove of dates and olives, who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home; who did not fire, who did not plunge the head into the toilet, who said stop, don’t do that; who lifted some broken someone up; who volunteered the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant is called a volunteer…
And there it is. There are our options laid out before us. This is our time (and I have “The Goonies” in my head typing that); we are here as volunteers the way plants are–we aren’t here by our choosing, but this is where we have sprung up.
What will we do? What will I do?
Will we choose to bulldoze, fire, and plunge heads with our words and actions? Will I incite violence, confusion, and add to the hate?
Or will I bring seeds, plant trees for shade and sustenance? Will I throw the keys to hate’s bulldozer that everyone is so quick to put in our hands–will I sail those keys into the ocean; will I say STOP, and instead try to lift some broken someone up?
Saturday was a day of running down tangents and seeing what was down each. When I take the time to follow tangents, to follow those paths my mind and heart open up, I find things I might not find otherwise. Down each of them, I find gratitude, mystery, wonder, and hope.
Those are the things I choose to share and hope to pass on.
