It occurs to me…

In a time when I may start to forget what a “normal day” looks like, this, written by Mary Jean Irion, resurfaced and reminded me that my appreciation of normal days should not be limited to times when there aren’t any.  The mental list of “normal” things I currently long for is growing by the day.  I wonder if I’ll have the sense to remember and appreciate that when things “return to normal?”

“A normal day.  Holding in my hand this one last moment, I have come to see it as more than an ordinary rock.  It is a gem, a jewel.  In time of war, in peril of death, people have dug their hands and faces into the earth and remembered this. In time of sickness and pain, people have buried their faces in pillows and wept for this.  In time of loneliness and separation, people have stretched themselves taut and waited for this.  In time of hunger, homelessness, and want, people have raised bony hands to the skies and stayed alive for this….

Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.  Let me learn from you, love you, savor you, bless you before you depart.  Let me not pass by you in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.  Let me hold you while I may, for it will not always be so.  One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands into the sky, and want more than all the world your return.  And then I will know what I am guessing; that you are, indeed, a common rock and not a jewel, but that a common rock made of the very mass substance of the earth in all its strength and plenty puts a gem to shame.

The day is over and now I will sleep.”

Photo (edited) taken a few weeks back in Portland, OR.

“To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.”  Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

He just had to add in that second part!

Photo taken yesterday through leaded front door glass.

“The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.”

In The Shawshank Redemption, Brooks Hatlen is released after fifty years in prison (1904-1954) and narrates this line as he ambles his way through a city, almost getting run over by a car.  After spending a few days, mostly working at home in light of the Covidid 19 situation, I feel the world slowing down.  One could, I suppose, go on at length about whether this is good or bad.  But I simply make this observation — I have been sitting frequently on the front porch swing over the last few days (there is supporting evidence in itself) and have watched an unusually large number of people walking by the house.  People, often several people, often what appears to be a whole family, kids in tow, out for a walk.  People out for a walk.  Not exercising (though it is that), not going up to the nearby restaurants and stores (though they may be) but just out for a walk, ambling with no apparent particular destination in mind.  Settled in the swing, glass of iced tea at hand, watching them amble by it feels like a Norman Rockwall painting on which I would provide this caption: “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.”

Figuratively (there is that social distancing thing), there is room for more on the swing.  Have a seat and watch.

“Happy events make life delightful, but they do not lead to self-discovery and growth and freedom….  Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation.”  Anthony DeMello.

I so want to argue with that but am hard-pressed to do so.  It occurs to me that perhaps this is why, in sports, it is so difficult for a team to repeat as a champion.  The winners are left with the delight of winning, and it is easy for the work that got them there to slip from their memory.  It may be natural to start believing your own “pub” and lose some of what got you there.  Who knows?  But note DeMello writes that painful events contain “a seed of growth and liberation,” a seed only.  In this I am reminded of the Danish proverb (though it sounds very German to me): “God gives every bird its food, but does not throw it into the nest”

Those seeds sown by adversity require recognition, and it is easy to overlook them whilst fretting over the adversity.  And once recognized, they require some care and effort for growth to occur.

What seeds has this adversity cast along my path, and what will I do with them?

Running today, I listened to an On Being podcast, Falling Together, in which Krista Tippett interviewed Rebecca Solnit.  It was recorded some time back but played again this week because of the appropriateness of the topic – how we maintain hope in adversity.  If you are so inclined, here is the link to the hour-long interview – what else do you have to do???

 https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/

This from Solnit talking about the difficulty to have hope when change is slow:

“Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart.  Sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the universe [which he sermonized “is long, but always bends toward justice”] is too long for you to see its curve.  Sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward, to study the line of that arc.”

I like this thought that sometimes hope is gathered by looking back, not by looking forward.  It makes sense, of course, because my ability to predict/understand the past is WAY better than my ability to predict/understand the future.  Yet in this “what have you done for me lately” world, hope seems to be understood as exclusively forward looking.  We look forward for hope, and if we can’t see any in the next _____ [fill in your personal temporal tolerance amount] then we despair, even wallow.  And in the midst of this Covid 19 pandemic, anyone taking in the news and internet chatter can find it easy to despair, easy to wallow.  I’m all in for hand washing and social isolation, but perhaps I should give up trying to become an epidemiologist and figure this pandemic out in my spare time and instead look backward a bit and think of those instances when, against all logic and reason, over time, it (whatever “it” was then) somehow worked out.  And if that seems to difficult, then perhaps reading Luke 21-25 will do the trick.

Anxiety – concern related to something that might occur in the future, might not, hasn’t yet.

Regret – concern related to something that has occurred in the past.

Life – all that occurs between anxiety and regret.

Live life.

Not anxiety.

Not regret.

Photo taken of the roofline of my house, converted to a pencil sketch.  Text is derived from Psalm 46:10.

Today’s quote is from the well-known philosopher, Boy George:

“If you have to be in a soap opera, try not to get the worst role.

I am no soap opera aficionado but have seen enough to know that each soap opera has that character, the one character that stirs the pot and seems to be at the center of all the conflict.  The point is we don’t want to be THAT character in the soap opera of life – though it seems as if some have studied well for that part.  Still, “try not to get the worst role” is good advice.