Let this day’s air praise the Lord—
Rinsed with gold, endless, walking the fields,
Blue and bearing the clouds like censers,
Holding the sun like a single note
Running through all things, a basso profundo
Rousing the birds to an endless chorus.
Now, shout from the stomach, hoarse with music,
Give gladness and joy back to the Lord,
Who, sly as a milkweed, takes root in your heart.
~Robert Siegel
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
~Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come”
It is…the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life…
The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
~ G.K. Chesterton
Suicide rates globally have climbed 60% in the past forty years,
particularly in developed countries.
Based on the distress of the patients I see every day,
the easy contemplation of suicide,
if only a passive “I wish I were dead”,
there will be no slowing of this trend.
…when there is no sense of loyalty to life, as stressful and messy as it can be,
…when there is no honoring of the holiness of the created being,
…when there is no resistance to the buffeting winds of life,
only a toppling over, taking out everything and everyone in the way,
…the world is wiped out, all people killed in one act of self-murder.
If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity,
so that finding a penny will literally make your day,
then,
since the world is in fact planted in pennies,
you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Planted pennies
on days like today
are like raindrops,
just as plain and more than plentiful.
When I’m feeling dry and withered
I only need to look up into gray skies
and all the drops fill my bank
and hydrate my soul, lost in wilderness.
The desert flows, my thirst is quenched
by something so simple, so underwhelming,
so enriching
as pennies and raindrops.
When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distanceand said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”
Exodus 20: 18-19
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind use to cry and the hills sing forth praise?
~Annie Dillard from Teaching a Stone to Talk
We push God away, not wanting to see His fire, smell the smoke of His burning branches, nor feel the singe of our own eyelashes by His heat. In our discomfort, we fail to listen to His voice coming from the fire. So we have doused it, quenched our longing for Him by our fear of submitting to Him.
And we cannot relight the burning bush ourselves; it is rekindled only by His ignition through His incarnation — God With Us invites us back to the mountain, onto Holy Ground, to face Him.
Once again we can hear the wind cry and the hills sing forth praise by listening for the voice of God Himself.
The tree is more than first a seed,
then a stem,
then a living trunk,
and then dead timber.
The tree is a slow,
enduring force
straining to win the sky.
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
And so should we be
so much more than mere life cycle:
we are infinite variety
and fascinating diversity,
clothed in finery
yet naked and vulnerable,
we lift burdens in our arms
and harbor the frail,
dig our roots deep
and hold fast,
shade those overcome,
and sing in the breeze.
Most of all
we aim high,
to touch a sky
beyond our grasp.
People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be.
When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying,
“Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.”
I don’t try to control a sunset.
I watch with awe as it unfolds.
~Carl Rogers
Our son Ben turns 25 years old today, spending this quarter century birthday as he does every day: teaching math to high school students on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. We watch in awe as his life unfolds, wonderful and rich, its warmth and love reflected like an orange sunset onto all he touches.
This wasn’t just plain terrible,
this was fancy terrible.
This was terrible with raisins in it.
~Dorothy Parker
More and more of my clinic time is devoted to evaluation and treatment of depression and anxiety rather than sore throats, coughs, UTIs and sprains/strains. An outbreak of overwhelming misery is climbing to epidemic proportions in our society. A majority of the patients who are coming in for mental health assessment are at the point where their symptoms are interfering with nearly every aspect of their daily activities and they can no longer cope. Their relationships are disintegrating, their work/school responsibilities are suffering, they are alarmingly self-medicating with alcohol, marijuana and pornography or whatever seems to give momentary relief. Suicidal ideation has become common, almost normative, certainly no longer rare.
Things seem terrible. And not just plain terrible. First-world-problem-terrible with raisins in it.
We have lost all perspective about terrible.
Terrible is what happened to the Philippine people in the midst of the most horrific typhoon this month –losing everything from their lives to shelter to any means to stay warm, fed and secure, much less find medical care.
Terrible is what happens in numerous countries where political oppression sends refugees across hundreds of miles and borders to seek asylum in foreign lands.
Terrible is what happens when hundreds of thousands are dying from AIDs, leaving behind their infected orphans to fend for themselves and care for each other.
Terrible is trafficking of human beings for power, gratification and money.
There is plenty of just plain terrible and most of us have no clue what it feels like. We are so absorbed in our own scratches from the ubiquitous thorns of life, grousing about the raisins that pop up in our own version of terrible, oblivious to the relative comfort with which we are graced daily compared to most of the world’s population.
Sometimes I think the best treatment for anxiety and depression has little to do with correcting brain chemistry or getting to the right cognitive behavioral insights to beat back negative thoughts, but rather to spend a year digging wells and latrines for those who have never used one. It is spending hours caring for the detoxing or the dying to see what misery really looks like. It is understanding how the fight for basic survival after an earthquake, a hurricane, a typhoon, a flood, a tsunami, makes life even more precious, rather than thrown away as if it is something you can simply upgrade or exchange for a new version.
Maybe, just maybe, when we reach in deeply, even sustaining the scars that come with everyday living, we can look past the thorns to the fruit. We may bleed getting to it. Maybe then the raisins don’t seem quite so terrible after all.
The stripped and shapely
Yea, I have looked, and seen November there;
The changeless seal of change it seemed to be,
Fair death of things that, living once, were fair;
Bright sign of loneliness too great for me,
Strange image of the dread eternity,
In whose void patience how can these have part,
These outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart?
~William Morris, “November”
Barnstorming 