A Monday meander: A sad tale

Prayers and sunset light shining through them.

When I receive a gift I am acutely conscious of both the gift and the giver, and gratitude spreads through me. This gratitude coalesces into a wish to give something back. I long to please my giver, endow that generous benefactor with something that will offer comfort, nourishment, and delight equal to what I’ve received. When my benefactor is a place rather than a person, however, my role as recipient is less direct. I’m someone who has inadvertently stepped beneath a stream of beneficence not specifically intended for me but suddenly pouring all over me. If I wished to offer thanks, how would I do so? Does a place have consciousness, such that it can receive gratitude for what it has given just by being itself?

~ Trebbe Johnson

A Monday meander: Horsing around

Gossiping on the beach.

The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction — not just for Native peoples, but for everyone.  Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion — until we teach them not to.  We quickly retrain them and make them forget.  When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation.  Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.”  If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw.  If a maple is a her, we think twice.

[…]

… Learning the grammar of animacy could well be a restraint on our mindless exploitation of land.  But there is more to it.  I have heard our elders give advice like “You should go among the standing people” or “Go spend some time with those Beaver people.”  They remind us of the capacity of others as our teachers, as holders of knowledge, as guides.  Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world.  We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species.  But imagine the possibilities.  Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us.  We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves; there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us.  Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Cleaning house

When autumn begins decluttering.

We dream of having a clean  house — but who dreams of actually doing the cleaning?  We don’t have to dream about doing the work, because doing the work is always within our grasp; the dream, in this sense, is to attain the goal without the work.

~ Marcus Buckingham

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Lower the bar.  Actually spending ten minutes clearing off one shelf is better than fantasizing about spending the weekend cleaning out the basement.

~ Gretchen Rubin

A Monday meander: What’s happening

On the dock on Jane’s Island.

Once I had imagined that my journey would be like the Pilgrim’s Progress, where each adventure brings the hero closer to the heavenly city, but the Christian God with whom I had been intoxicated in my teenage years did not survive the theological studies I undertook to serve him (and it was a him).  When I turned outward, angry and heartsick, to political affairs, I found that I was a failure as an atheist, too, for I could not cure myself of praying to a God I no longer believed in.

~ Joanna Macy, from the preface to Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I am the one whose praise echoes on high.
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.
I am the rain coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I am the yearning for good.

~ Hildegard Von Bingen

Random bits and pieces

Yellow rumped warbler in the woods.

Oh, the sweetness of realizing: I am not other than what I’m experiencing.  I am this breathing.  I am this moment, and it is changing, continually arising in the fountain of life.

~ Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self

Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.

He says look forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.

He says keep praying.

He says everyone of us is a child,
everyone of us is ancient,
everyone of us has a body.
He says everyone of us is frightened.
He says everyone of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive–
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
Water is alive.

Everything has its own life.

Everything lives inside us.

He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn’t matter if you draw,
or write books. It doesn’t matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.

It matters that you feel.

It matters that you notice.

It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.

He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.

Love, feel, let life take you by the hand.

Let life live through you.

~ Roger Keyes

A Monday meander: All over the place

Rising.

We do not know how this pandemic will change our lives, change the scenery of our world. For how long will “social distancing” remain? Will we ever return to cheap crowded flights? How long and desperate will the food lines get? It is as if someone has pulled the thread that held it all together, even as we struggle to “return to normal.” But the question is, what story are we trying to tell ourselves? Or are we between stories, in a state of unknowing and insecurity? What are our dreams telling us, what is the message of our hearts? As Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.” Is this a moment when the light can come in through the cracks, through the structures in our civilization that have been shown to fail?

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

A Monday meander: Walking here and there

Morning, glory.

The human heart is the first home of democracy.  It is where we embrace our questions.  Can we be equitable?  Can we be generous?  Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?  And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up — ever — trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?

~ Terry Tempest Williams

“Heart” comes from the Latin cor and points not merely to our emotions, but to the core of the self, that center-place where all of our ways of knowing converge — intellectual, emotional, sensory, intuitive, imaginative, experiential, relational, and bodily, among others.  The heart is where we integrate what we know in our minds with what we know in our bones, the place where our knowledge can become more fully human.  Cor is also the Latin root from which we get the word courage.  When all that we understand of self and world comes together in the center-place called the heart, we are more likely to find the courage to act humanely on what we know.

~ Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy