Sunday Best – September 17, 2023
Despite the pumpkin-spiced energy that’s surrounding us – or maybe because of it – I found myself overwhelmed this morning, just not up to the task. Not the tactical tasks of weeding and emails, not the more vital tasks of being a good sister or daughter or friend, not even the core human tasks of feeling feelings or thinking thoughts.
Somehow I found myself sifting through the junk drawer, which was decidedly Not A Task on my priority list. In just ten minutes, the broken garage clicker, mismatched screws and nails, and worn-out markers were all cleared away, and everything felt clean and organized and fit for purpose.
Is the junk drawer a silly metaphor for my cluttered state of mind? Yes.
Is clearing it out a shallow substitute for taking agency over a non-controllable world? Also yes.
And.
It’s also an actual drawer, which is now better, giving me hope that bigger, harder issues can get better too.
Dear ones, inspiration is not always rainbows or poetry or the laughter of a child. Sometimes it’s dusty batteries and rusted paperclips and a candle stub from three storms ago.
Friends, whatever frees us up,
whatever gives us hope,
let’s give thanks.
Sunday Best – September 10, 2023
Early in my career, I was on a downward escalator in a faraway airport, grumpy from a missed flight, when I heard a familiar voice calling my name. A friend from high school had spotted me going the opposite direction, across the miles and across the years. After an awkward scramble we met up for a quick hug and hello, and in just those few moments I was re-rooted in my own life, no longer drifting as an unknown person in an unknown place.
This week brought some flashbacks of that feeling as I ran into a long-ago colleague at a business conference. In a sea of anonymous analysts suddenly I was a whole human again, one with friends and feelings and ideas that extended beyond that morning’s financial news. Even better, two different sets of dear friends rearranged their plans so that we could meet in person after a long time apart.
Sometimes it seems that time is not on our side. We are so much in motion that by the time we’ve fully arrived, we are already departing. We are caught in traffic of all sorts, missing connections both literal and metaphorical.
Dear ones, in these blurry bleary times, may we be the ones who stop on the escalator, the ones who call out across a conference room, the ones who cross town at rush hour to hug a friend.
There might be just a moment to spare.
But a moment can be momentous.
Sunday Best – September 3, 2023
Possibilities are always more interesting than facts.
– John O’Dononue
I’ve been spending these cooler early mornings with John O’Donohue, through the wonder-full compilation Walking in Wonder, based on conversations with his friend John Quinn.
Today I aim to practice his advice on landscape.
One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still with in it. If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape.
Landscape is always at prayer, and its prayer is seamless. It is a high work of imagination, because there is no repetition in a landscape. Every stone, every tree, every field is a different place. When your eye begins to become attentive to this panorama of differentiation, then you realize what a privilege it is to actually be here.
Dear friends, let’s get into the landscape today, whether it’s a potted plant or vast forest.
Perhaps we will feel sisterhood with the clay.
Perhaps we will hear the seamless prayer.
Perhaps we will see a teeny tiny frog no bigger than a fingernail.
Perhaps we will realize what a privilege it all is.
Sunday Best – August 27, 2023
It is ten years already since the passing of Seamus Heaney. His final message – noli timere, be not afraid – is with me always, in a little heart shaped amulet that I carry everywhere.
It is tempting to surround our heroes in fluffy pink clouds of admiration, as if they represent nothing but bluebirds and roses and charming one liners that would look great on a coffee mug. But our poets illuminate the essentials of life that are otherwise felt but unseen – both the shadows and the sunbeams.
Here is a small excerpt from Heaney’s Nobel lecture, where he describes our desire to re-tune the world, and how this endeavor requires space for both the marvelous and the murderous.
…there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself…
Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears… the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential, but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art.
Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture. Blowing up sparks for meagre heat…
Then finally and happily, and not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in spite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvelous as well as for the murderous.
Dear ones, let’s straighten up.
Not to avoid the weight of the world,
but to witness its marvels as we carry.
* It is hard to narrow down Heaney’s work to a few suggested sources! Opened Ground is a wonderful anthology of his poems through 1996; the RTE’s multi-volume set of recordings of Heaney readings allows us to hear his own voice; his version of Beowulf won the Whitbread prize and is now out in an illustrated edition; and the Nobel lecture noted above can be seen in full at their site. Finally, my sister sent me a link to an RTE radio series celebrating Heaney this month, which led me to their amazing archival rabbit hole.
Sunday Best – August 20, 2023
Some days a little storm cloud sits overhead – the coffee is cold and the lines are long and the news is mean and there seems no grace or kindness to be found.
But then the driver coming towards me slows on the road and I spot the reason – an enormous turtle is crossing the way. The facing car stops and I stop and the cars behind us all stop, and I can see each person’s irritation turn to wonder as we watch her progress one plunk at a time across the yellow lines. She’s the biggest turtle we’ve ever seen in these parts and yet she must have been right there beside us all along, in the marshy patch beside the road. No one honks or yells or swerves – we’re just quiet, waiting, watching.
Dear ones, we just need a moment.