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An Unlived Life

I’ve read this poem many times (and perhaps have posted it on this blog a time or two) and it always has something to say to me. Pay attention, pay attention, whisper the words in between the lines. It came to me again this morning and I’m paying attention. Maybe it has something to say to you as well?

I will not die an unlived life,
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise…

-Dawn Markova

Mercy, Now

I’m sure I haven’t seen a video of Boy George performing, or a news clip or even a picture of him, in many years. But there he was on the second day of Lent when I clicked the link at the end of an online Lenten devotional from the Northumbria community that I’ve been reading most mornings since Ash Wednesday. He wore a flashy red hat, a black shirt, and generous swipes of gray eyeshadow and black eyeliner. Welcome to my morning, Boy George. Sing me a song.

“Mercy, Now” is the song he sang. I’d never heard the song before. The first stanza is about a father who is having a hard time. He’s lived his life and death is near. “I love my father, and he could use some mercy now.” In the second stanza, a brother is struggling and in pain. Mercy, now. The song turns its attention to church and country, to every living thing, to each of us, all of us. “Every single one of us could use some mercy now.”

The song kept playing in my head, along with the image of Boy George, singing and smiling and dancing on stage. A couple weeks later, on day 16 of Lent, another entry in a second Lenten series I’ve been reading, this one by Tamara Hill Murphy, again included a link to another version of “Mercy, Now.” This time it opened to the song sung by Mary Gauthier and in a slower, more somber style. I later read that Gauthier wrote the song, both the words and music. In her book, Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, Gauthier wrote of visiting her father as he was dying and in the days that followed she wrote the song. She has sung it at every concert since. (Here’s a link to the lyrics.)

“People sometimes cry when they hear it, but if tears come, I think they are tears of resonance; the words provide listeners a witness to their struggle. ‘Mercy Now’ started out as a personal song, then it deepened. It became universal.”


Then the next day, Lent day 17, the Northumbria series presented yet another link to “Mercy, Now,” this version by Alana Levandoski from her album, Hymns From the Icons.

“Mercy, Now,” three times in my inbox. I’m grateful.

~~~

[Photo: These aren’t the palms from a Palm Sunday morning but from a trip to Florida several years ago. How lovely today, after getting 14 inches of snow Friday night, is the remembrance of them, reflected in the pool.]

On the Way to Sight

I’ve been working on a jigsaw puzzle, a good thing to do on a cold, late winter’s evening. It’s only a 300-piece puzzle, one that my children did, but all the pieces are so very busy that a few minutes into it I felt as if the puzzle would humiliate me, that I’d be unable to do it. I think of social media posts I’ve seen of people sharing completed 1000-piece puzzles. I could do this one, I told myself.

After the edges were in place, I got in the groove as I was filling in a hot air balloon in the top right corner. Find your way by spotting the patterns, I told myself, one pattern at a time. The bright zigzag stripes of color of the balloon. The dark blue of the waves. The cords of the sailing glider. The red streamers the children are holding. Look at the chaos of the pieces on the table but set your eyes to see. To see the patterns. To see even the hints of patterns.

Look long enough and you realize there is more to see. I used to be a cytogenetic technologist, analyzing chromosomes, a mass of black and white and gray bands on each of 46 paired chromosomes, with each pair different and sometimes differences within pairs. How is it possible, I thought at the start of that training. But you look and look and look and look, and practice, practice, practice, practice, and eventually you see each of the hundreds of bands and know exactly where they should be and when something is not as it should be. You just know.

I’ve learned this lesson so many times in the past, but it’s something I seem to need to keep learning. To trust that keeping my eyes open will eventually lead to sight. I’ve also learned that sometimes I need help seeing something right in front of me. A second pair of eyes might see the spiral in one corner of the chaos that connects to the piece I had overlooked. Just this week I read a line of prayer, something I’d read—even recited—a hundred million times, and saw it in a whole new way thanks to what someone else wrote about it.

~~~

[Photo: A space station Playmobil set that my children played with when they were little, now being enjoyed by my grandson.]

Moving Your Hand Across the Page

What is needed on mornings when you sit down to write but have no idea what to write is the simple movement of your hand across the page. Your fingers grip the pen. Up and down, up and down. Right to left and back again moves your hand. This is what writers do first and foremost: they move their pens across the page. Isn’t it true for most of us that we do motions of things over and over and nothing of note emerges, but over time or here and there in the routine movements evidence of the development of something wonderful emerges. The creation of a life, the care of other lives, an idea that changes the world in one of its teeny tiny corners, or helps a child, which indeed is changing the world. Who can know what a life faithful to its routine will affect?

~~~

[Photo: taken of stained glass window, made by the Mosaics Art Shops of Minneapolis, for the Merchant’s Bank in Winona, MN, designed in 1911 by William Purcell and George Elmslie.]

Standing in Line for Ashes

This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Maybe for you this day will be like any other. Or maybe you will go about your day but imagine a swipe of ash across your forehead. Or maybe, like me, you will go to a service, stand in line with others—likely some who are stripped bare or who carry a quiet grief or any number of everyday anxieties—and a minister or priest will make the sign of a cross on your forehead using ash from palms burned from last year’s Palm Sunday.

My friend Daniel Thomas has just released a new collection of his poetry, Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn. The poems explore how a long relationship of love is like a spiritual practice, and this exploration often comes disguised as narrative about forging streams and climbing mountains. A couple weeks ago I started reading his book and came upon the poem “Ash Wednesday.” I read it. Then read it again. And again. I closed the book and opened it and read it yet again. Please read it now yourself.

Go to this link. Read.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and listen to Dan reading the poem. Reading and listening are two different things.

Carry the words with you and the way they made you feel into the beginning of Lent. Read and listen in imagination or anticipation of ash on your forehead, of standing in a “ragged line,” of carrying or observing “grief concealed.” 

~~~

[Photo: a field in February.]

Walking, Walking, Walking

At the recommendation of several friends I recently read The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. It’s about a couple in their mid-50’s who lost everything, including their home, simply because they had signed a contract backing a friend’s business and when that business went down so did they. When this terrible thing happened, instead of collapsing or giving up or lying on a couch forever watching TV or any number of things that I or many of us would likely do in the direct aftermath of a terrible or even mildly distressing event, they instead went on a 630-mile walking journey around the coast of England. They took a tent and camped at wild sites. They didn’t stay nights here and there at Airbnbs or hotels to give themselves a break. They didn’t order carry-out food to take and eat under the stars. They carried everything; they lived on little food (mostly noodles); they bathed by jumping in the ocean. They chose to do a hard thing. They did a hard thing.

At the end of the book they were changed, as in any journey story. And their journey changed me. It made me a bit braver in my own journeying, or at least made me want to be a bit braver.

“We hadn’t been afforded the luxury of time for the shock waves from our past to play out and then—as in any good nature-redemption story—to go off into the wilderness to refind our way in life. But things had hit us in the face like a tidal wave and would have washed us away if we hadn’t found ourselves on the path. Our journey had drained us of every emotion, sapped our strength and our will. But then, like the windblown trees along our route, we had been re-formed by the elements into a new shape that could ride out whatever storms came over the bright new sea…. At last I understood what homelessness had done for me. It had taken every material thing that I had and left me stripped bare, a blank page at the end of a partly written book. It had also given me a choice, either to leave the page blank or to keep writing the story with hope. I chose hope.”


Once, I experienced a deep and sudden sorrow, and a friend who had gone through the same thing called me and told me: Walk right through it. Walk right through it as opposed to trying to avoid the pain, as opposed to hiding from it, as opposed to drowning it in one thing or another. I followed my friend’s advice the best I could and thought of it when reading these pages.

Isn’t it a good rule for all of life to keep walking right through whatever happens, literally or figuratively? To walk through to whatever is next, and maybe it is in the walking that recovery happens, that meaning gets made.

(As an important aside: There’s an interesting story of physical healing in this book as well.)

~~~

[Photo: A bright and delicious joy that each winter the cold north receives from the warm west and south, with thanks.]