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

"After Work" by Jane Hirshfield

Recently, I read the first poem in a book that's been sitting on my shelf, unopened, for a long time. "After Work" by Jane Hirshfield in her book Of Gravity and Angels. Of course the title intrigued me. “After Work.” Work isn’t a common word in the titles of poems.

I invite you to pause now and read the poem for yourself. Here’s a link to where the poem is printed. Please do click the link and read it. But don’t forget to come back. Or, if you’d prefer, click the link below and listen to me read the poem (with Over the Rhine, "May God Love You" in the background).

This poem is anchored in the the after-work space. Work is over, and it has likely consumed the mind and the physical energy of the poem's narrator. She has sat at a desk or stood at a work station or bounced here and there around other people's needs all day. Consumers, patients, customers, colleagues. Probably inside 4 walls, probably in indirect lighting, probably following a script of some sort, probably channeling from her experience and education only what is applicable to the task at hand. Eight hours later, more or less, and the work is done. Punch the time card, close down the machines, hang up the white coat, the apron, the lanyard with her name tag.

And the narrator enters the space of the rest of her life.

She enters full and whole and living space. Beauty is present. She calls to an animal, a horse, obviously known and loved. She offers a treat, corncobs. They look at each other eye-to-eye. And the universe is reflected in the horses’ eyes.
 

and in the night, their mares' eyes shine, reflecting stars,
the entire, outer light of the world here.


When I first read those last lines I nearly gasped.

During work, however you define work, our efforts are one teeny tiny piece of the whole, and here now, when work is done, is the remembrance of the whole. Here now is the need to reorient. The need to shake ourselves and remember, with each leaving of work, the immensity of the universe of which the work was a part. Shake yourself and expand. Relax your eyes and reorient to more than what you see at your desk, your work station, your register, your waiting room, your conference table. See the whole.

The reflection in these horses’s eyes is reminding the narrator and you and me to emerge from the tunnel of our days and newly re-imagine the universe in which we work and breathe and live.

~~~

[photo: early morning rabbit prints]

How to write a nature poem

My dear friend Jessica Brown and her husband Simon, recently made a short instructional video about how to write a nature poem: Seeing Eyes: How to Write a Nature Poem. Although they wrote it for a children's art festival, anyone, no matter their age, can enjoy and learn from it. The video is filmed in Ireland, where Jessica lives. I hope you'll watch it and maybe then write a poem! But even if you never write a poem, watching and listening to Jessica may inspire you to view the nature all around you differently, to have "seeing eyes."

~~~

[Photo: Nearby beauty]

Mary Peelen and Quantum Heresies: On The Eating of a Pear

three_pears_2006.128.14.jpg

Back in March I listened to Zoom episodes of the Madeleine L’Engle Seminar “Poetry, Science and the Imagination,” produced by Image and hosted by Brian Volck, every Wednesday over the lunch hour. All five episodes were wonderful, but I was particularly intrigued with Mary Peelen. A science-minded writer, although not a scientist, Peelen has written a book of poems called Quantum Heresies, which I ordered soon after the episode. Her poems are loaded with reflections on chaos theory, parabolic arcs, chromosomes, supernovas, gravity, algebraic variables, and a myriad of other images that become metaphors for life.

In the poem titled “One,” she writes of a pear. An ordinary pear.

When I come to you
offering one small green pear,

I’m asking you to believe in
every green there is,

at every hour.
The whole tree.

This past year we’ve been eating a lot of pears and until reading this poem I never once thought about the trees from which they came. Do I even know what a pear tree looks like? In what town did the trees grow? What state? What did the field of pear trees look like? Each pear existed and grew on a specific branch on a specific whole tree in a specific location under a specific square of sky and was picked by a specific set of human hands belonging to a specific person and packed into a specific box before being loaded onto a specific truck and on and on before it finally arrived at my house and was bitten into by me.

The thought exercise may seem inconsequential, but it does open up a point of wonder, a point of connection to a world beyond my appetite, my refrigerator, my grocery store. Multiply this exercise by all the different things you eat during the day—an egg, an onion, a steak perhaps—and the world rapidly expands yet keeps one in a web of provision.

Two small green pears are now sitting on my kitchen counter. While waiting for them to soften a bit before eating, I’m wondering where they’ve been.

~~~

[Photo: “Three Pears” by Paul Cézanne; copyright free via the National Gallery of Art]

Writing an Elevenie

In May I took an online writing class from Christine Valters Paintner, online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts and author of The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom. She led those of us on the Zoom call through a series of writing exercises, and I want to share one with you because it was surprisingly easy and the yield satisfying. Paintner showed us how to write a 5-line, 11-word poem called an Elevenie (also called an Elfchen) by giving the prompt for each line followed by about 20 to 30 seconds to write that line.

Line 1 is one word that identifies an object, a thing. Line 2 is two words that answer the question, What does the word from Line 1 do? Line 3 is three words that answer the question, Where or how is the word from Line 1? Line 4 is four words that answer the question, What do you mean? Line 5 is one word that answers the question, What is the outcome? Of course, you can interpret these prompts fairly loosely.

Here's what I came up with:

Green
Joy tapped
Deep deep down
Life spirals up out
Dance

Maybe you will try it?

Enough light to find your way by

LightOnTW1-3-21.jpeg

Enough light to find your way by. In his sermon a few weeks ago, which my husband and I watched on YouTube, the minister of our church spoke of an Icelandic term that I’d never heard before.

Ratiljóst

He told us it means having “enough light to find your way by.” He likened it to other words from Northern Europe that have served a good purpose among us in recent years in terms of expanding our sense of how to live. Like “hygge,” the Danish word for coziness. Or “lagom,” the Swedish word for “not too much, not too little; just right.” Or “sisu,” Finnish for grit in the face of great adversity.

Ratiljóst, enough light to find your way by.

This word, or to be more honest, this definition, has been rolling around in my mind ever since I heard it. Enough light to find your way by. Isn’t that the longing of each day? Particularly in these days of Covid stress and fear and grief, these days of political angst, of economic angst, of division. Enough light to find your way by.

It reminded me of a time when I spent a couple 10-day periods on Whidbey Island on Puget Sound for graduate school residencies. To go from the building that served as the student center to the houses where we stayed, you had to walk through a wooded area. There were no lights on the path and at night it was pitch dark. Being already in a rural area with no nearby background urban lights that could share their glow, walking that path alone at night was unnerving, even if walking with a friend. The span was only that of about a long city block but in my memory it was much longer. We used the light from our flip phones—it would be several years yet before smartphones with built-in flashlights—to help light the way, but the faint light that shown from a phone’s open face barely illuminated where our next step would land, let alone what was on either side of you in the woods or a preview of what or who was approaching. Enough light to find our way by, but only just enough. If I’d known the Icelandic word then I may have been tempted to go to the nearby town some afternoon while there and have it tattooed on my hand as a reminder of all that was truly needed. Just enough light. For now, I’ve written the word on an index card and pinned it on my bulletin board above my desk. Maybe it’s a word you’d like to consider as well. Ratiljóst

~

The mention of light came again in the days after that sermon, at the presidential inauguration here in the US. The part of the inauguration event that I want to call to your attention has nothing to do with whether or not you voted for the man who is now our president. The part of the event I’m calling your attention to is when Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old inaugural poet spoke. Two lines soared for me at that moment, and I quickly wrote them down:

"There's always light if we're brave enough to see it.
If we're brave enough to be it."

Let’s be light for each other, shall we? I need your light, and maybe you need mine. When walking through the dark wooded area I described above, it was all the better to walk with a friend by the light of two flip phones rather than one.

~~~

[Photo: taken of light on a nearby lake just after the new year. The winter solstice is now behind us and the days are getting longer. Thanks be to God.]

The Slow Work of God

GrayHeadedConeflowers.jpeg

Last week I was on a vacation/writing retreat. Sitting on a bookshelf where I stayed was the book, To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation by Laura Kelly Fanucci. This wonderful poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin jumped off a page for me, and I want to share it with you. It speaks to the challenge of finding our way in life, the challenge of being patient when things take ever so long, and the challenge of understanding the apparent slow timing of God.

Read it and see if it doesn’t resonate with something in your life, if it doesn’t give you some hope for being on the way.

“Patient Trust”

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.

And yet, it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(In: To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation, Laura Kelly Fanucci, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017. In: Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, edited by Michael Harter, 58. Chestnut Hill, MA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993.)

~

[Photo: taken of gray-headed coneflowers that I passed on a recent prairie walk]