“Are you dancing?” –greeting from my friend, Saheeb
Are you dancing?
Has your soul found its wings,
caught the rhythms that surround you,
felt the throb of waking earth beneath your feet?
Gratitude List:
1. aconite
2. crocus
3. that wren out there, hailing the morning
4. children playing in the sandbox for hours
5. voices of sanity among the clang and clatter
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Friday morning hymn sing with my colleagues.
2. Blue, blue, blue, sky blue as Mary’s robe.
3. The way humor can sometimes make the bleak and difficult breathable.
4. My colleague Amanda, who helped me out of my February Funk yesterday by reminding me that February is the time to be actively seeking the minute indications that the season is progressing. I came home and found one crocus bud and one aconite bud.
5. The tiny wing-person with the huge voice who is singing songs of spring.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday, there was sunshine. So much sunshine.
2. I left 20 minutes late for work yesterday (which, in my world, still gets me to school 40 minutes early), and caught the sunrise. So much color! I am hungry for color. Ravenous. The season is shifting out of greyscapes into pastels now and I can start to breathe.
3. Left foot, right foot, breathe.
4. Collaboration
5. Listening
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. I am grateful that my friend’s surgery seems to have gone well.
2. I am grateful that we were able to get a much better interest rate for our mortgage (more of a mundane concern than I usually write about perhaps, but this is a grace that comes at a good time).
3. I am grateful that there are always enough hours in a day, even though it sometimes doesn’t seem like it.
4. I am grateful that the sun will return again.
5. I am grateful that my children have safety and comfort. My prayer is for safety and love for all our children. They are all our children.
May we walk in Beauty!
I came home yesterday to this pensive smile. Does anyone else see inanimate objects smiling?
My brain has filled with fog. What is it veering away from? What wintry truth do I avoid by settling myself back into the mists and bogs of my brain?
Perhaps it’s just the overweening weariness of February. I don’t care what anyone says: It might contain fewer days, but February is the longest month. Some years February is harder than others. Maybe I just need a little more sunlight.
I begin to notice the sunreturn in January, and that has its thrill, but by February, the process seems too slow and ponderous. Just bring me light, already! It’s coming. I might be grouchy about it now, but I can wait. The sun always returns, whether I am paying attention or not. Meanwhile, I will see what I can learn from the bogs and fogs of February.
Gratitude List:
1. Musings. Every year, my church puts together our own book of writings for Lent. People take the lectionary scriptures and use them as a jumping off point for writing a contemplative piece. I look forward to it every year, every morning reading a thoughtful pondering by someone in the congregation.
2. Hot sauce
3. Editing. Last night, I submitted a packet of poems to the Spoken Word Festival. I haven’t sat down to simply edit and revise my work like that for a long time, and it felt so good. I need to be careful–the editing bug catches me like an obsession. I need to put this one off until the summer so I can focus on my daily work. I don’t think I have the discipline to just work on one poem at a time. But the dream of putting together the next book will feed me for the next few months.
4. The sun will come back. It always does.
5. Color
May we walk in Beauty!
You have always known what dawn has to offer you,
what the new-born crescent of a moon
hanging above the oaks on the hillside
wants to tell you about your birth,
how you are born every minute
re-cast, re-formed, re-molded
from the stuff of the which
the stars are made.
You have always known what the owls meant
when they called you out of dreaming
with their shadowy conversations
to listen with your whole body
to their fierce song of desire
that pulls you like tides
into this holy breath
of the day’s longing.
You have always known how it would be here
how this taste of daily incarnation
would ignite those inner bonfires
that keep you always burning,
always longing, always open
to fierce and tender winds
that call your soul awake
into the dawning.
Gratitude List:
1. Words of courage and conviction and challenge.
2. Keeping the hands open. Avoiding the closed fist.
3. How they laughed while watching Pippi Longstocking.
4. How we’re all in this together. You do your part, I do mine, and they’ll do theirs, and it all gets put together to make for a new thing in the world.
5. The little breaks and graces that add up to mean more than they mean. How that makes the coping and muddling all more workable.
May we walk in Beauty!
Weave the web between us.
Gratitude List:
1. Puzzles and conversation and happily hanging out with my parents yesterday.
2. Flexibility, adaptability, rolling-with-the-punches. No way around it when we get at least one snowy mess a week.
3. Church as storytelling
4. Feathers and stones
5. Letting new ideas burn through
May we walk in Beauty!
Sometimes I think that I am a Benedictine, seeking the Order that would give my life an established contemplative rhythm: work and prayer, work and prayer, work that is prayer.
Sometimes I think I am Ignatian, looking to follow the Rule, the map to the journey inward: this step, then this one, then this–deeper, deeper, deeper.
Sometimes I think I am Franciscan, seeking the Holy One in the mundane, in the wild places, in the faces of people around me, in the incarnate world.
Or–how would I even say this one?–Julianist? Seeking ecstasy and union with the One.
Hildegardian–Searching for the correspondences between the eternal and the temporal, to see the macro within the micro.
Brigidan–Tending, nurturing, observing, experiencing pure devotion. Perhaps this one could also be called Oliverian (I am a follower of the way of Mary Oliver, of paying attention).
My own tradition has no saints, so I wander into the realm of the Catholics and others to borrow theirs. The more I study, the more it seems to me that some of the least dogmatically churchy people are some of the people the church holds up most lovingly for veneration. Even many of my own Anabaptist forbears were rebels and refuseniks, iconoclasts and outsiders. It helps me to remember this, that my own sense of being on the edge, of standing in the open field outside the structure of the church, of lurking on the fringes, is part of a long tradition. It’s what Father Richard Rohr calls the place of spiritual freedom: “a life on the edge of the inside–not at the center or at the top, but not outside throwing rocks, either.”
Some of those we venerate were stone-throwers themselves. I’ve seen the modern iconoclasts and rebels picking up stones, have joined in that myself, actually. And if I am honest, my fingers still occasionally twitch with the desire to join the battlers again. Sometimes even the people who speak most passionately and articulately for the way of peace and justice in the world are all the while wreaking violence and destruction in the spiritual field. I will put down my stones, and I will continue to stand out here on the field of the fringe, my feet in the world of both/and.
Perhaps, in the end, I am all of the above, and a Mennonite, too, following the path of Menno Simons toward Quietness, toward Yieldedness, toward Community, not blind submission to the established order, but a resting in the peace of being on this wide and open field, experiencing and sharing grace, absorbing the lessons of so many who have been here before.
Gratitude List:
1. The field is so wide, so eternally expansive
2. Articulators, people who envision the pathways–saints and poets and musicians and artists and children and you
3. Purring–why is a cat’s purr so calming to humans?
4. Someone else woke up early in this house so he could make paper hearts to hang all around to celebrate Valentine’s Day
5. Balance
May we walk in Beauty!
I took this back in the autumn, but as I look at it now, I think it looks like a World Tree.
Gratitude List:
1. The UNICEF Social for the Middle School last night. I was tired from a week of work, and really desiring some introvert time, so I wasn’t quite sure I was up for it, but it was incredibly worth it to see the high schoolers reaching out to the Middle School kids, giving them a great time, and getting a chance to get to know some of those bright and shining 6th-8th graders. One girl told me afterward, “This was so great! We don’t often get a chance to just hang out together.” I’m proud of the UNICEF team.
2. Game Night at church last night. So I didn’t get to go home and have my introvert time after the social because we had game night at church afterwards. What fun. I am so glad that we went. I felt sort of like that Middle School girl, really grateful for a chance to just hang out with these people. I agree with Erin–we ought to consider monthly game nights, or at least every other month. . .
3. Movers and Lovers. I love Mindy Nolt‘s music, and I woke up with “Movers and Lovers” in my head this morning. Just the soundtrack I need this morning, when I finally get a little introvert time.
4. Lancaster Food Company‘s multi-grain bread. It’s so tasty. And they exist with a social purpose. Check out their About page.
5. Heart. The heart is a forest that always has more spaces to explore. Always another grove or bosque, previously overlooked, just waiting to be known. I love being a human being.
May we always walk in Beauty!
Someone has been making Valentines.
I don’t suppose it’s plagiarism to grab something I wrote two years ago and put it up here today. This is an old gratitude list, but as I was looking at it this morning, I was struck by how profoundly applicable it is to my Now, so I am reprising it today. I need to keep point #5 in mind. I could extend that one today, to say that when we really believe in the goodness of people, in the truth of their hearts, people rise and reach outward in ways that surprise us all. I know it’s true for me. I am always more likely to extend myself out of my self-absorbed bubble when I know that the people around me are expecting the best of me.
With students, I think this is incredibly important. When we approach a situation or a class with a sense of suspicion, they will respond with defiance. When we believe in their hearts and minds, and ask them to be authentic human beings, they are eager to share their profound truths and to show kindness. Yes, there is sometimes a lot of goofiness and cynicism and youthful narcissism to wade through at times, but accountability and trust are powerful offerings that help to overcome some of the prickliness. And they, of course, often see our own prickliness and harshness more clearly than we do.
Gratitude List:
1. Strong boundaries
2. Compassionate hearts
3. The balance of boundaries and compassion
4. Morning mist rising from my River. When I say “my” River, I don’t mean it as mine alone. Nor do I mean that it is my River exclusive of all other rivers. But it can be my River and one of my rivers and still belong also to you and to all of us in the way that I can say you are my Friend, and yet you are not exclusively mine, nor are you my only friend, but that I love you in a particular way that is particular to our relationship. My River. The mist rises from it in the red morning light, and there is so much magic in it. And also in you.
5. And this: Goodness. There is so much goodness in people, in strangers even. And I know too many stories, especially in recent days, of people who fell to the lowest pitches of bullyhood and meanness and real evil when left to their own devices. But this also is true, so gloriously true: that so many people are simply good, simply full of heart and tenderness and compassion. That you do not have to bang on the doors or scratch very deeply at all before goodness oozes out all over, fresh and raw and sweet like honey. I have seen it just today, how you can look into a stranger’s eyes and see it and know it is there, and follow it. The guy who drives your tow truck may be a philosopher to rival the ancient mystics. The woman who sells you groceries may have some rich wisdom about human nature that even the respected psychoanalysts have yet to figure. So many wise ones to discover. So many namaste moments to explore.
May we walk in Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 