Okay, I've already posted today.
Oh, well. I am posting again.
Because listen, after spending too much time scrolling down posts in Facebook, which tell me exactly what I already believe (because we can pick and choose our feed, can't we?) and further ensuring a sense of despair that deepened as in that terrible wintry hour of sudden darkness, with the music playing senselessly in the kitchen and the girls watching too much TV. . . .after all this, I am beginning to realize what I am missing, what so many of us have been stripped of in the past week, starved of:
Wonder.
I realize that on my daily walk I have not been listening to what the moss in the sidewalk, or the lichen on a tree, or the bird, singing loudly and insistently from a pine bough, has to tell me. I have been raging inside. In the tempest of my mind I have been constructing conversations, rebuttals, fireballs for the unjust.
Withdraw, withdraw to a quiet place.
I will not let myself. Distraction is one thing, whether it is TV or twenty minutes spent pinning Scandinavian gardens to my board on Pinterest. But true rest? I believe I desire it, but I suspect I do not deserve it; I think, what of my sisters and brothers who cannot rest? And so I busy my mind; while I am eating lunch, I frantically read the news; while I am cooking, I rail yet again against injustice. To be silent is to be complicit. Yes, but to fill my mind with the senseless noise reverberating from the news, which never sleeps?
Ah, but suddenly this evening, after this early evening's spate of profound discontent, when I found myself struggling to pay mind to my daughters' smiles and stories, I remembered walking one morning, not so long ago, without earbuds in my ears or the clamor of warring voices in my mind--I remembered walking in silence, with my eyes wide open. I remembered that I was listening, not only with my ears, but with all my senses, and yes, though it sounds ridiculous, with my spirit, too.
I have talked so much about listening to others but this last week, I have forgotten. I have allowed myself to be robbed of wonder. And I cannot truly listen to others and love them rightly when, in my self-righteousness, I have forsaken wonder.
So tonight, I tell to you these simple details: in the sky tonight, I saw the crescent moon, bright and sharply defined against a dark purple sky, and not far away, its companion, the bright evening star (planet! my girls reminded me tonight). I tell you this: the coals at the bottom of my wood stove glow bright orange and blue flames leap disembodied and wild above; outside the rosemary plant in my garden grows wild and full of scent and not so far away, the mountains rise sharp and snowy under the moon.
*
I am beckoned by wonder tonight to poets, the guardians or 'custodians of language,' as the lovely Irish poet Michael Longley says in his interview last year with On Being's Krista Tippett. In particular, I'd love to share with you a portion of this beautiful poem by (another) Irish poet, David Whyte:
Your great mistake — Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice
You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you courage.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
The tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.
Read the wonderful conversation between Tippett and Whyte (or listen) by clicking HERE.
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