Sunday Best – November 3, 2024
I started to read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story as a sort of distraction from the current U.S. political season and all of its noisy isolating polarization. It has turned out to be not a distraction, but an antidote.
For example, she describes her husband Dick’s change of heart regarding his own memoirs when he turned eighty and realized that the entire history of the nation was only “three Goodwins” long:
Dear friends, if we are lucky, we will be able to measure our lives in Goodwin-style lengths. Indeed, when I read that the first U2 album is closer in time to Pearl Harbor than today, I have to double check the math.
So much can happen,
much of it good,
some of it great.
If only we keep going.
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.
– Seamus Heaney
Sunday Best – October 27, 2024
This seems to be the season for pie charts.
Asset allocations? Here’s a pie chart.
Nutritional analysis? Here’s another.
Life planning exercise? You guessed it.
Dear ones, it’s true that our budgets might benefit from this kind of view, and our schedules might be enhanced by careful planning.
But the substance our lives is not meant to be chopped up and rearranged into an ever-elusive optimized solution.
Unlike a pie, the very best parts of life are not finite.
Wonder is not a pie.
Imagination is not a pie.
Love is not a pie.
Friends, let’s plan the things that need planning, and allocate the things that need allocating.
And then let’s revel in life’s unbounded delights.
Sunday Best – October 20, 2024
Today was a perfectly ordinary day, one with wide open spaces instead of jam-packed commitments.
I took refuge in the quiet corner of the apartment when the jackhammers started at breakfast time.
I read a poem while making coffee.
I walked by the river to get to the post office, crystal clear sky above and crunchy fall leaves below.
I stopped by my favorite bakery for a lunchtime salad… and a jelly donut just like my grandmother used to bring us from New York.
I took a tiny nap.
I had dinner with dearest loved ones.
I watched a favorite movie, quoting the best lines out loud with my sister.
Perfectly ordinary.
Friends,
may we revel in the extraordinary joys of our ordinary days.
Sunday Best – October 13, 2024
Tramping through the woods this week, I was able to cross a creek bed that had been impassable during the springtime rains. The view was clear across a pond that had been obscured by the summer’s tall grasses. The source of this summer’s hornets was suddenly revealed, their giant nest dangling from a tree branch.
Autumn can be a season of endings and losses. The frost comes sneaking in at night, the tender plants curl, and the light shrinks with each passing day.
Yet it can also be a season of deepening, where saplings set their roots, long-awaited harvests come through, and subtle truths become evident. The skies themselves can surprise us.
Dear friends, in this time of turning, let us ask ourselves,
What is newly visible?
What is newly valuable?
What is newly possible?
Sunday Best – October 6, 2024
It’s routine in some parts for total strangers to remark, “have a blessed day.” And I can’t count the number of times I automatically murmur “bless you” each sneezy winter season. All of this casual generalized blessing might lead us to discount the word. Fortunately, I was recently reawakened to the depth of its meaning by the poet David Whyte.
A blessing is more than good wishes, he noted. It is someone seeing greater things in us than we see in ourselves, and wishing us greater good fortune than we would dare to dream of for our own lives.
Dear ones, if we are very lucky indeed, we have a few cherished people who do not only love us, but bless us. They see our highest selves. They light a brighter path.
May we bask in this generosity.
May we extend our own blessings in return.
Beannacht / Blessing
by John O’Donohue
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
* This lovely blessing from John O’Donohue, and many others, can be found in his book, To Bless the Space Between Us. And more wonderful illuminations on language can be found in David Whyte’s Consolations.