Thinking and Writing About Your Work

Those of you who have read my blog or newsletter for awhile may have seen mention of this before, but given that the second edition of Finding Livelihood was recently published, I wanted to mention it again in case you missed it the first time around and also to let new readers know about it. I've put together a guided journal that you can download, print out, and write in. While it corresponds to the book, you neither need a copy of the book nor do you need to have read the book to make use of the journal—although I always highly recommend both having a copy of the book and reading it (wink). Each page of the journal has a writing prompt to get you thinking about your work life, and you can define work as broadly or as narrowly as you like.

Here are a few examples of the writing prompts you'll find. There's 18 in all.

 What unexpected turns has your work experience, or the work experience of a spouse, taken?

In what ways are you satisfied and unsatisfied in your work? How has your degree of satisfaction changed over the years?

What people and events can you witness—pay attention to or “see ”—through your work?

I hope you'll download the journal, consider the questions, and even write for a bit. I also hope you'll let me know what you discover.

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[Photo: Grass from Jay Cook State Park in northern Minnesota. Aren’t the colors gorgeous?]

Stopping for a Garden

One day earlier this summer, my husband and I drove down a road we've driven a hundred thousand times and were about to, once again, pass an entrance to a place we've never been, when in a surge of adventure and discovery, we decided to turn on the blinker and pull in. It was the entrance to a wildflower garden—the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary. It's hard to say exactly why neither of us have ever gone through that gate, but for me, it probably comes down to assuming nothing much was there other than a garden plot, plus a negative reaction to something I'd once heard long ago, both adding to up to not really even seeing the sign anymore. That day, though, we saw the sign, we made the turn, drove in, and parked. We walked to the gate and stepped through.

There's a dream I've had periodically over the years. Maybe you've had a similar dream. In my dream I discover that my house has many more rooms than I ever knew. The doors open endlessly, and there's more there than I could ever have imagined. I don't wake up from this dream relishing the revelation of hidden wealth but instead relishing the sensation of something more. There's more here than I ever knew. More to be discovered. More to be revealed. That's how it felt going through the gate of the overlooked garden. Fifteen acres—this was no small garden plot!—of wetland, woodland, and prairie; the oldest public wildflower garden in the United States. Amidst the flowers and the ferns were benches, benches, benches everywhere, placed at all different angles and in private places for thinking, dreaming, and watching. Benches for sitting and being calm in the beauty. The beauty!

The garden was started in 1907 by botany teachers from the Minneapolis Public School system. The group was led primarily by Eloise Butler, a teacher who retired in 1911 but kept working in the garden. Inside the entrance there's a picture of her, in a long dress of the day, digging with a shovel.

We've since gone out to the Garden a couple mornings before work. Each time we brought a thermos of coffee and some bagels. We found a bench right in the midst of the beauty and started our day. We ate and talked. We were quiet. We prayed. We walked and took pictures and looked with eyes open wide. He and I both plan on going back again and again.

Maybe there's a place of potential beauty and potential calm right near where you live that you've been driving or walking by so very many times without stopping.

I encourage you: stop.

~~~

[Photo: taken of some ball-like, spikey flowers I saw on the first time to the garden. On a second visit, I found the tag that identified them: buttonbush.]

A Presidential Model

There’s a scene at the beginning of episode 6, season 3, of the television series “West Wing,” in which President Bartlet and his wife, Abbey, are bantering about their morning at church as they walk down the West Wing Colonnade. The day’s text was from Ephesians and back and forth they go on the handling of it in the sermon. I only recently started watching this show on Netflix, 20 years after it first launched on NBC, and am finding something noteworthy nearly every time I turn it on. President Bartlet ends their discussion by, rather heatedly, pointing to and expounding on verse 21 of chapter 5: “Be subject to one another.” But then a number of his team arrive and bad news descends and the mood shifts. Even so, as Bartlet and his chief-of-staff, Leo McGarry, turn toward each other to talk, Bartlet, in a calm and gentle tone, starts their conversation with, “Be subject to each other, Leo. What can I do to be subject to you?” Imagine what could happen if each of us at least thought that, didn’t even say it, when we were at work each day no matter our status above or below those around us? What can I do to be subject to you?

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[Photo: taken of an outside wall at the Peter Engel Science Center at St. John’s University.]

Thinking in Private

In the current issue of Comment magazine (Summer 2019), Hannah LaGrand, in her piece “Tiny Mind,” writes about the role of thought in a world where we put so much of ourselves online for others to see. How much of one’s thought life should remain private?

Lots.

Drawing on the writing of Hannah Arendt, LaGrand writes: “The public world of appearances must be rooted in something that does not appear.”

LaGrand goes on to make a critical point, that it’s not only how much of ourselves we put out there, but how much of what everyone else puts out there do we take in? How much opportunity do we give ourselves to think our own thoughts? How much time do we leave “to spaces of unproductivity and wasted time and quiet. It is these dark and dingy spaces in which might find depth.” Her thinking goes along with my thoughts about leisure in Finding Livelihood.

I hope you’ll read the full piece, also online at the Comment website.

~~~

[Photo: taken on Lake Sagatagan at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN]

Susan Orlean, The Library Book

I just finished reading Susan Orlean's The Library Book (Simon & Schuster, 2018), which follows the story of the 1986 fire at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, the largest library fire ever in the United States. Was it arson or not? More than one million books were damaged or lost. Interestingly, not many people heard about this fire as it was happening or afterward because the fire started on the same day as the news broke about the Chernobyl  nuclear disaster. The book is about more than the story of that fire, however. The book expands to include the story of libraries. Libraries! What they mean, or have meant to us, personally. What they mean to society.

Orlean wrote of often going as a young girl with her mother to the library in her Cleveland suburb and the deep childhood memories those visits instilled in her. Her memories reminded me of all the times in grade school when I rode my bike along with my best friend who lived next door to our neighborhood library and then returned with bike baskets full of books, which we'd read on the grass under shade trees. Orlean wrote next of a long span as an adult during which she never went to libraries, forgetting the joy and magic they held, until her young son wanted to interview a librarian for a school project. When she entered the LA Central Library with her son, all her childhood library memories came back and the library "spell" was again cast on her. I remember spending years as a young mother going only to the library's children's room with my sons and coming home with stacks of their books. Then one day I let myself walk out of the children's room and pick a book of my choosing. Like Orlean, I was again hooked. There's probably not been a time since then when I haven't had at least one library book checked out.

What was most fascinating to me in Orlean's book is finding out the nearly unbelievable scope of action librarians practice. They do more than order and keep track of books. They do more than books. Librarians are our historians, our social workers, our public health spokespeople, our childhood educators, our teen counselors, our _________ —fill in the blank and librarians are probably busy doing it. The role of the library has increasingly expanded to take a frontline position to care for people in its community.

In the book's conclusion, Orlean underscores that libraries—through the work of librarians and all those who help fund and source the libraries—hold our stories. Think of that "our" in the biggest possible way. All of our stories. Orlean writes:

"The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come."

~~~

[Photo: taken in the Cadillac Center Station of the Detroit People Mover]

Hope on the pages of children's books

A recent article in The Guardian suggested five children’s books every adult should read. Katherine Rundell, author of the article, the newly released Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise (Bloomsbury), as well as numerous children’s fiction books, says that she writes for two audiences—herself now and herself at age 12 years—putting into a limited number of words what she most wants “children to know and adults to remember.” Rundell suggests adults should read children’s books from time to time for intrusions of “sustaining truths,” which often can only come to us through imagination.

One of the sustaining truths that adults need to remember, according to Rundell, is hope.

“Children’s books say: the worlds is huge. They say: hope counts for something, bravery will matter, wit, empathy, love will matter.”

Rundell writes that to see hope as well as other truths on the page, we need imagination:

“When you read a children’s book, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra. But imagination is not and never has been optional: it’s at the heart of everything, the thing that allows us to experience the world from the perspective of others, the condition precedent of love itself. For that we need books that are specifically written to give the heart and mind a galvanic kick—children’s books. Children’s fiction necessitates distillation; at its best, it renders in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy, fear.”

The five children’s books identified by Rundell in the article, which she recommends that adults read, are The Paddington books by Michael Bond, His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, One Dog and His Boy by Eva Ibbotson, and Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie.

We still have many of the children’s books from when our sons were young, a handful of which have been brought up from the basement bookshelves so as to be handy to read them to our new grandson. Here now in front of me is Harriet and the Garden, written by Nancy Carlson. I’m flipping through the pages and indeed hope is there: Harriet has run into Mrs. Hoozit’s garden, trampling her lilies, rose bushes, and prize dahlia, while trying to catch a fly ball in a neighborhood ball game. She feels so badly, so guilty, that she runs home and tries to pretend it didn’t happen or that it didn’t matter even though she can’t eat, can’t enjoy her favorite television show, can’t sleep without having bad dreams. The next day she goes to Mrs. Hoozit and tells her what she did. Mrs. Hoozit brings her out to the garden, and they work together to fix what is broken. A picture* shows them side by side, mending plants. Indeed this is a book filled with hope: that what is broken will be restored. People and relationships as well as plants.

As I read books to my grandson, not yet a year old, I’m going to keep my eyes open for infusions of hope from the pages.

What children’s books have spoken to you of hope?

~~

[Photo at top: taken of daisies.]

[*Photo from Harriet book: Carlson, Nancy. Harriet and the Garden. Minneapolis, MN; Carolrhoda Books, Inc.: 1982.]

The Prophetic Imagination

A few nights ago I was talking with some writer friends about our respective works in progress, and I mentioned that one of the sections in my hope manuscript draws on Walter Brueggemann’s writing in his books The Poetic Imagination and Reality, Grief, Hope. One of the friends told me that she had recently listened to Brueggemann being interviewed on the radio program “On Being” and sent me the link (“Walter Brueggemann: The Prophetic Imagination”). I listened to it while taking a walk a couple mornings later and again just this afternoon. Although recorded in 2011, and re-aired last December, the content is just as relevant today. I encourage you to listen as there is much wonderful wisdom here on hope, the use of metaphor and poetry in understanding God, and the mercy of God.

Here’s a small section:

The other text I’ll read is Isaiah 43. It’s a very much-used passage. “Do not remember the former things nor consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” And apparently, what he’s telling his people is just forget about the Exodus, forget about all the ancient miracles, and pay attention to the new miracles of rebirth and new creation that God is enacting before your very eyes. I often wonder when I read that, what was it like the day the poet got those words? What did it feel like, and how did he share that? Of course, we don’t know any of that, so it just keeps ringing in our ears.

I first read Brueggemann when I was at St. John’s Abbey Guest House in Collegeville, Minnesota (6 years ago?). I was in the library writing when a book on the shelf, The Prophetic Imagination, caught my eye. I took it down and read it nearly nonstop over the next day or so. I hope you’ll take a listen.

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[Photo: taken on the Detroit River Walk in Detroit, where we were for a wedding several weeks ago.]