One Insight to Bring Into 2023

One habit I’ve sort of unintentionally fallen into in recent years is a year-end review. That is, I’ve been finding it interesting to take some time between Christmas and New Year’s every year to consider the highs and lows of the year, reflecting on what I can take from this year to build on for the next. With all the highs and lows that made up 2022, this poem I first heard on Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer’s podcast stands out:

Small Kindnesses, by Danusha Lameris

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say ‘bless you’
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. ‘Don’t die,’ we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us ‘honey’ when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, ‘Here,
have my seat,’ ‘Go ahead – you first,’ ‘I like your hat.’“

In particular, what gives me pause are lines that “we have so little of each other, now… only these brief moments of exchange.”

Like so many others,’ my life has changed during the past few years. COVID has meant I see students and colleagues far less often. My kids are getting older – one now in college – and they spend less time with us. The people I care for the most I don’t actually spend that much time with.

I resonate with the notion that the moments we have together may be “the true dwelling of the holy.” If I can remember to take one thing from this year into the next, it’s this: remember the sacredness of the times we have together – really appreciate them and make the most of them – for they are the essence of a good life.

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A Poem of a Parent with Teenagers

“You’re in my thoughts and prayers.”
Maybe instead I should recognize:
“I hold you in my heart, in my thoughts, and in my prayers.”

As I hold you, I’m learning
Not to hold you so tightly,
As this only suffocates.

May I instead learn to hold you with open hands,
Allowing you to fly away as needed,
Hoping you know I’m always here and hoping you will return.

One Thing Among Many

I’ve been reading and discussing Parker Palmer’s new book, “On the Brink of Everything,” recently, and with great benefit. Many of my discussions seem to return to a portion of a poem, which I share below. Its insight requires no elaboration.

“Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.”

~Czeslaw Milosz

Mary Oliver, Poem #4

This is Mary Oliver’s most famous poem, which ends with one of the most important questions we ever could ask ourselves. I love how she frames it.

***

The Summer Day

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver, Poem #3

This part of a Mary Oliver poem deeply resonates, at least with me.

“Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.”

Mary Oliver, Poem #2

This Mary Oliver poem reminds me how such a complex universe requires multiple ways of knowing, and how our preconceptions sometimes influence what is possible in our perceptions.

***

The World I Live In

“I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.”

Mary Oliver, Poem #1

The older I get, the more I am (to my surprise) drawn to poetry. When I read the Bible, I spend more and more time in the Psalms. A few years ago, I shared my favorite poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Recently, I finished Mary Oliver’s book on “Devotions.”

Mary Oliver is best known for her nature poetry, and has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. For those who don’t know anything about her, here is a rare interview on my favorite radio program / podcast, On Being.

I’m tempted to comment, but over the next week or so, I plan to just share some of my favorites of Mary Oliver’s poems. They speak for themselves.

Here’s the first, called “Swan.”

Christian Wiman’s Thoughts on Faith

In his op-ed, “The Subtle Sensations of Faith,” David Brooks calls “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,” “the best modern book on belief.” The author, Christian Wiman, has struggled – for many years – with a rare form of cancer, and he lays bare many of his rawest thoughts in this book about many aspects of meaningful living, particularly in relation to faith. I think the best way to give a quick glimpse is to share a few select passages.

***

“No one ever believed in God without perceiving God.”

“To say that one must live in uncertainty doesn’t begin to get at the tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs flexibility.”