If only those parakeets would settle A little nearer to where I’m sitting, instead of at the tops of far-off trees, this morning Would be so much more remarkable. One could watch the blackbirds, I suppose, peck their ways like Oxford dons across The flagstone paths and lawns, or the swallows, or the sparrows, Or the crows. But those birds are so plain—, so…painfully available. No, only those parakeets will do and they will not do What I want them to. In this, they are like everything else in the world. Every beautiful thing. ~Jay Hopler “Beauty is a Real Thing, I’ve Seen It”from The Abridged History of Rainfall
“Get up,” he says, all of you – all of you! – and the power that is in him is the power to give life not just to the dead…, but to those who are only partly alive, which is to say to people like you and me who much of the time live with our lives closed to the wild beauty and miracle of things, including the wild beauty and miracle of every day we live …and even of ourselves. ~Frederick Buechner -from Secrets in the Dark
May I never just be partly alive, longing for a far-away untouchable beauty rather than noticing what is glorious right in front of me.
This is the package of life: the plain and the mundane, the painfully and wonderfully available, the shadowy and the brilliant.
I want to be fully alive to the wild beauty and miracle of every day, heeding His call to “get up!” no matter how I may want things to be different, no matter how I may want to be different.
And so I believe ~truly believe~ I am called to be fully alive, and gratefully acknowledge the miracle of this and every day.
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Each one is a gift, no doubt, mysteriously placed in your waking hand or set upon your forehead moments before you open your eyes…
Through the calm eye of the window everything is in its place but so precariously this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it, all the days of the past stacked high like the impossible tower of dishes entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself perched on the top of a tall ladder hoping to add one more. Just another Wednesday
you whisper, then holding your breath, place this cup on yesterday’s saucer without the slightest clink. ~Billy Collins, “Day” from The Art of Drowning
Some days feel like this: teetering at the top of a finite number of minutes and hours, trying to not topple over a life so carefully balanced, even as the wind blows and the fencing sharp and the ladder of time feels rickety.
It is a balancing act – this waking up to try on a new day while juggling everything still in the air from the days before.
To stay on solid ground, while flowing with the river of time, I anchor deep into the calm eye of your unchanging love, reminded, once again, I’m held up from above when everything beneath me feels precarious.
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The great mystery of God’s love is that we are not asked to live as if we are not hurting, as if we are not broken. In fact, we are invited to recognize our brokenness as a brokenness in which we can come in touch with the unique way that God loves us. The great call of Jesus is to put your brokenness under the blessing. ~Henri Nouwen from a Lecture at Scarritt-Bennett Center
Some say you’re lucky If nothing shatters it.
But then you wouldn’t Understand poems or songs. You’d never know Beauty comes from loss.
It’s deep inside every person: A tear tinier Than a pearl or thorn.
If I look down, a ferry is always docking or pulling away from the shore. I am not always aware of these goings on anymore than I am my own breathing, but, when I do take note, the sense of overseeing this step in a process that’s both open-ended and fixed fills me with a vague dread
while passengers, whether boarding or landing, may feel they are finally getting somewhere ~Rae Armantrout “Somewhere” from Wobble
We live in a state that depends on ferry travel to get across Puget Sound/Salish Sea from the mainland to the islands and peninsulas. Other than the occasional bumpy crossing in windy weather, it is usually a quiet interlude on our way to get somewhere, time to take a brief nap or a few deep breaths. No one thinks about the possibility of trouble when riding the ferry to work or back to home.
This past week, trouble happened. A generator failure aboard the ferry Walla Walla took out power mid-voyage, including ability to run the engine, so the ferry drifted to shore and ran aground. Over 500 passengers and crew were stuck on board with nowhere to go; certainly no routine coming or going except by rescue transport via smaller boats.
A vague dread indeed – I’ll be thinking of ferry rides a bit differently now. I’m relieved no one was hurt, but only inconvenienced. Thankfully I wasn’t on board this particular ferry run, stymied in my effort to try to get somewhere.
I have never been promised my journey to somewhere would be full of puppies and rainbows. In fact, I’ve run aground and had equipment failure aplenty. So when things do go smoothly, I need to acknowledge it for the blessing it is — just like breathing is a blessing of comings and goings.
Take a deep breath and bon voyage.
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With great power there must also come great responsibility… ~The “Peter Parker Principle” from Spiderman Comics (1962)
From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. Luke 12:48b (NIV)
Jesus concludes his parable of the wise and faithful servant with this line, which has become a modern mantra – thanks to Spiderman, the U.S. Supreme Court, Winston Churchill, Bill Gates and a few recent U.S. presidents.
Yet no one actually quotes the full New Testament parable itself ending with this very concept.
The story Jesus tells in Luke 12: 42-48 makes us wince, just as it is meant to:
42 The Lord answered, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? 43 It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. 44 Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions.45 But suppose the servant says to himself, ‘My master is taking a long time in coming,’ and he then begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk. 46 The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers.47 “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. 48 But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.
The same story as told in the gospel of Matthew ends not only with “a few blows” but with “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Somehow that part is left out of Spiderman’s story, even though Spiderman experiences plenty of weeping in accepting his fate. Still, this is a bit too close to home for those in power and those with immense wealth — like Peter Parker’s reluctant acceptance of his Spidey powers, we know all too well the reality of just how fragile and weak we really are despite American’s relative wealth compared to the rest of the world.
Those who live as Christians have particular responsibility and accountability, identifying by name with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who made the ultimate sacrifice for humanity. He took the blows so we would be spared – no more weeping and gnashing of teeth.
On this federal holiday honoring our government’s top executive position, we must continually hold our elected leaders to their vowed oaths of responsibility and accountability. As individual citizens entrusted with much, we have much to give even before we’re asked.
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Instead of depression, try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine Spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave. ~Andrea Gibson “Instead of Depression” from You Better Be Lightning
We didn’t say fireflies but lightning bugs. We didn’t say carousel but merry-go-round. Not seesaw, teeter-totter not lollipop, sucker. We didn’t say pasta, but spaghetti, macaroni, noodles: the three kinds. We didn’t get angry: we got mad. And we never felt depressed dismayed, disappointed disheartened, discouraged disillusioned or anything, even unhappy: just sad. ~Sally Fisher “Where I Come From” from Good Question.
…if you could distinguish finer meanings within “Awesome” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful.. .), and fifty shades of “Crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy.. .), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses. ~Lisa Feldman Barrett from How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others…. We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole being. That is healing. — Henri Nouwen from Bread for the Journey
If there is anything I came to understand over the decades I served as a primary care physician, it is that every person experiences painful emotions that make them miserable, making it even more difficult to share with others. Sometimes those feelings build up such pressure that they leak out of our cells as physical symptoms: headaches, muscle tightness, stomach upset, hypertension. Other times they are so overwhelming we can no longer function in a day to day way – described clinically as rage, panic, mood disorder, depression, self-destructive, suicidal.
Somehow we’ve lost permission to be sad. Just sad. Sometimes unbearably, hopelessly sad.
Sadness happens to us all, some longer than others, some worse than others, some deeper than others. What makes sadness more real and more manageable is if we can say it out loud — whatever ‘sad’ means to us on a given day and if we describe our feelings in detail, explaining to others who can understand because they’ve been there too, then they can listen and help.
Painful emotions don’t always need a “fix” in the short term, particularly chemical, but that is why I was usually consulted. Alcohol, marijuana and other self-administered drugs tend to be the temporary anesthesia that people seek to stop feeling anything at all but it can erupt even stronger later.
Sometimes an overwhelming feeling just needs an outlet so it no longer is locked up, unspoken and silent, threatening to leak out in ways that tear us up and pull us apart.
Sometimes we need a healing respite/hibernation, with permission to sleep through the world’s alarms for a time. At times, medical management with antidepressants can be incredibly helpful along with talk therapy.
It helps to find words to express how things felt before this sadness, where you are now in the midst of it and where you wish you could be rather than being swallowed by sorrow. Healing takes time and like anything else that is broken, it hurts as it repairs. Armed with that self-knowledge and some gentle compassion, tomorrow and the next day and the next might feel a little less hopeless and overwhelming.
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He will come like last leaf’s fall. One night when the November wind has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth wakes choking on the mould, the soft shroud’s folding.
He will come like frost. One morning when the shrinking earth opens on mist, to find itself arrested in the net of alien, sword-set beauty.
He will come like dark. One evening when the bursting red December sun draws up the sheet and penny-masks its eye to yield the star-snowed fields of sky. ~Dr. Rowan Williams “Advent Calendar”
He arrives when we are at our loneliest and most discouraged, a flash of brilliance, an emergence of new life when all seems hopeless, dead and dying.
He arrives to comfort and console us with His Words and reminder: all is not lost all is not sadness
There is work yet to be done.
Even now, after all we’ve been through- even now, as we are shrouded with new hope and arrested by His beauty.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among others, To make music in the heart. ~Howard Thurman
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“Hello, Rabbit,” he said, “is that you?” “Let’s pretend it isn’t,” said Rabbit, “and see what happens.” ~A.A. Milne from Winnie the Pooh
There are days when I am just weary of the status quo and would like to pretend I’m not me just to see what happens.
…not have the same worries, same bad habits, same aches and pains, same overwhelming obstacles. It might be quite refreshing.
But if I pretended I wasn’t me, I’m sure I would end up having a whole new set of problems, anxieties and fears that would rightfully belong to someone else.
I think I’ll stick with what I know and who I am. After all, I have it pretty good, and that is more than enough for me.
And besides, I kinda want to see what happens… just being me.
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A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning, then the sun — relating the difference between sadness and the need to praise that which makes us joyful, I can’t calculate how the earth tips hungrily toward the sun – then soaks up rain — or the density of this unbearable need to be next to you. It’s a palpable thing — this earth philosophy and familiar in the dark like your skin under my hand. We are a small earth. It’s no simple thing. Eventually we will be dust together; can be used to make a house, to stop a flood or grow food for those who will never remember who we were, or know that we loved fiercely. Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us toward the nearest star — a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible in the twilight as you travel east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround the heart and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible. ~Joy Harjo “Promise of Blue Horses” from How We Became Human
Birds embody the shapes of my heart these days
holding the warmth of a hug in their feathers
the gleam of a kiss in their eyes
building a home for my love in their beaks
and spreading, with their song, the promise of blue horses.
“A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning, then the sun— relating the difference between sadness and the need to praise that which makes us joyful.” ~Marjorie Moorhead, “That Which Makes Us Joyful” from Literary North
Even when my heart isn’t feeling it, especially when I’m blue (along with much of the rest of the world on this September 11 anniversary), I need to remember to whisper hymns of praise to the Creator of all that is blue as well as every other color.
I’m reminded of the goodness of a God who provides me with the words to sing and a voice to sing them out loud.
That reality alone makes me joyful. That alone is reason to worship Him. That alone is enough to turn blue days, blue horses and blue hearts gold again.
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