It occurs to me…

So last night, watching the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony I had recorded (how can one miss Joan Baez and Garth Brooks?), I heard Garth Brooks say this, which I promptly wrote down on a post it note and stuck on my desk as food for thought.– “The truth is we all become who we are by somebody else.”  

Sitting down this morning at the same desk, post it note nearby, I opened a book to this from Howard Thurman, and had one of those “Okay, God, I get it” moments I felt was too good to not share:

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The Thread in My Hand – Howard Thurman – Meditations of the Heart

Only one end of the threads I hold in my hand. The threads go many ways, linking my life to other lives.
One thread comes from a life that is sick; it is taught with anguish

And always there is the lurking fear that the life will snap. I hold it tenderly.  I must not let go….

One thread comes from a high-flying kite;

It quivers with the mighty current of fierce and holy dreaming

Invading the common day with far-off places and visions of bright….

One thread comes from the failing hands of an old, old friend. Hardly aware am I of the moment when the tight line slackened and there was nothing at all — nothing.

One thread is but a tangled mass that won’t come right;

Mistakes, false starts, lost battles, angry words — a tangled mass;

I have tried so hard, but it won’t come right….

One thread is a strange thread — it is my steadying thread;

When I am lost, I pull it hard and find my way. I am saddened, I tighten my grip and gladness glides along its quivering path;

When the waste places of my spirit appear in arid confusion, the thread becomes a channel of newness of life.

One thread is a strange thread — it is my steadying thread. God’s hand holds the other end….

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All of which leads to two questions now on the same post it note — 

What threads am I holding?

What is my steadying thread?

Continuing with his riff on Matthew 6:25, Howard Thurman writes this:

“Take no thought for your own life.  What a strange thing it is, this injunction.  Up to this period in my life, I have seemed to survive by taking thought for my life.  Upon deeper reflection, I begin to see that my lie is not now, nor has it ever been, my own.  I did not create nor have I sustained my life through the years.  In so many ways, without my own plans and purposes, hard places have been made soft and rough places smooth.  It is a source or immeasurable satisfaction and comfort to me to know that God, who is the Source and Sustainer or life, can be trusted to see me all the way to the end and beyond.  Take no thought for your life – it is in God’s hands and ever, when I am obeying the laws of life, it is God who works through me.

Take no thought for your life.”

Take no thought for your life.  That’s a BIG ASK for a stubborn old man, especially given, as Thuurman notes, “I have seemed to survive by taking thought for my life.”  “Seemed” being the operative word. But it occurs to me that this is perhaps a potential benefit of age – to become weary to the point that those ideas and thoughts that have been knocking at the door for years finally find a door left ajar, if only because it seemed too much effort/trouble to get up and close it. (See one of my favorite German words, “weltschmerz.”)

Photo is of “my place.” Text from Raymond Carver’s At Least.

In Meditations of the Heart Howard Thurman takes on that conundrum in Matthew 6:25.  You know (in the King James): “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.”  Though in some versions the translation is not “do not worry” but “take no thought.”  Which is where we pick up Thurman:

“Take no thought.  This day I shall desert my anxieties.  I shall forsake them – cut the off from the food supply of my spirit.  Confident am I that if I do not feed them they cannot long survive….  Into God’s hand do I yield myself this day, with all that it involves for me, with he faith that I can take complete refuge in the knowledge and the love of God.  For me this will not be easy, nor do I lightly undertake it.”

Boy, he said a mouthful there!

My anxieties – “if I do not feed them they cannot long survive.”  Well, intellectually, I know that to be true, but damn, my Jabba the Hutt anxieties have been so well fed over the years that they can live a good while off their existing body fat.  So the “this will not be easy” is, well, classic understatement.

Granted, one seemingly needs to be of a certain age to remember and/or care, (and of a certain age where the remembering part becomes more and more of a challenge) but those of us who do know that the 3rd of June is a remarkable day in the history of music.  This is the day memorialized by Bobbie Gentry as “the day Billy Joe McCallister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”  This 1967 classic is certainly indelibly written into the American Songbook.  So on this day, give it a listen.  Two choices, feel free to sing along:

The iconic original by Bobby Gentry that drips of the late 60s.

If anyone comes close to the original, it is Patty Smyth on this version, great background music by Tom Scott & The L.A. Express

Here’s a bit of trivia.  Note that in this storytelling, and this is great storytelling, no one at the dinner table, the narrator’s whole family, has a name, just mamma, brother, papa…, yet every other person in the song does have a name.  

This song also presents a textbook example of a MacGuffin, an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself — that is, in this instance, the question: Just what did they throw off the Tallahatchie bridge? — that is a pure MacGuffin.

Photo taken on a beach walk a few months back. You never know what you’ll come across on the beach.

Photo of a flowering weed picked by the roadside on a recent walk. Text from John Berryman’s Address to the Lord.

From Howard Thurman:

“It has been aptly said that the time and place of a man’s life is the time and place of his body, but the meaning and significance of a man’s life is as creative, as vast, and as far-reaching as his gifts, his dreams, and his response to his times can make them.”

Which strikes me as a riff from the Jackie Robinson quote, one of my favorites: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”   Or maybe Robinson was riffing on Thurman.  In any case, let’s not lose the point (or at least one of the points) of each.  We each hold the ability to make a difference in some form or fashion.

Another accidental photo. Text derived in thinking about this by Howard Thurman:

“Often, the degree to which we oppose a thing marks the degree to which we do not understand it.  Sometimes we use our opposition to an idea to cover up our own ignorance.  We express our dislike for things, sometimes people, when we do not understand the things we pretend to dislike; when we do not know the people for who we have antagonism.”  Howard Thurman

Photo taken from the I35 walkway over Lady Bird Lake (formerly known as Town Lake).