All the Time in the World

A Blessing For One Who Is Exhausted

by John O'Donohue

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

-John O'Donohue

On my nightstand: Brown Girl Dreaming

Photo from April 2015, and more to come about those other two titles.

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson was chosen by my book club here in Golden. My friend Freida invited me to join last fall, and I like how they choose their books. Everyone suggest titles and then they vote, with the top 12 becoming the books for the year. When you host, you choose which of the remaining 12 will be read that month. I’m hosting this fall and chose All the Light We Cannot See.

I already had Brown Girl Dreaming on my ‘to read’ list as many friends and fellow-book-nerds in our Book Bingo group raved about it. Then I heard this interview with Woodson and Terri Gross. Even with those high expectations, I was blown away by Woodson’s writing.

It’s a memoir, which I love. It’s written in verse, which I love. Back when I taught poetry, my students and I would wrestling to form a definition of poetry. The best definition we came up with was: “saying the most with the least amount of words.” Woodson somehow captures the perspective of a young girl, the personalities of her family, and the intensity of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s---all with so few words. With a few brush strokes. With moments.

Brown Girl Dreaming is classified as a book for children; it received a Newberry Honor and should be in every middle school library. And yet, I would place it beside Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I’ve often lamented that there are so few bildungsroman from a female perspective. I had read To Kill a Mockingbird numerous times as a teen before it finally hit me that, even though Scott was the narrator, it was Jem’s story. Here, finally, is a portrait of the artist as a young brown girl.

Sunday Poem or Prayer

 

Late Fragment

by Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

 

Photo from our trip to Puerto Morelos, February 2014. Poem from Carver’s last anthology, A New Path to the Waterfall

April 5, 2014

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving   

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   

as a woman takes up her needles   

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   

Let the wind die down. Let the shed   

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   

in the oats, to air in the lung   

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   

be afraid. God does not leave us   

comfortless, so let evening come.

January & February: Things I Learned

I announced the week of giveaways, and then promptly didn’t post again. They are coming---just haven’t had time to post. Tomorrow is the last day to enter the $25 Amazon giveaway in the Oscar Contest!

I’m making the time to post today, even though there still isn’t time. Emily Freeman is hosting her Let’s Share What We Learned series, and I’ve learned I have to make time---because it is never gonna just show up. I’ve already made my image above with the number 5, so I’ll have to limit myself to that. Self-imposed limits are a good thing.

1. Did you know you can go online to Sam’s Club and fill your cart and they will have it waiting for you the next day? It’s called their Click n’ Pull service.

I did not know this. When the very nice clerk told me this, I almost cried. I’m not a fan of Sam’s in general (there’s no Costco in Grand Junction). Still, every three or four months we restock our house with paper goods and toiletries. It involves a two hour drive each way, and normally Brian is the one who takes on the Sam’s Club list while I take the boys somewhere fun, like Target. This time I went solo, which is lovely in terms of the time alone in the car but horrible in that I have no time to run into Michael’s or the children’s resale shop, as I had hoped, because Sam’s Club sucks the life out of me (and because Sean had to be picked up from violin at 5 while Brian was coaching Nolie’s soccer team).

I really wish I had learned this two days ago. When I told Brian about my amazing discovery last night, he nodded nonchalantly and said, “Yeah, I knew that but I kinda enjoy walking the store.” This man suffers from NON-DISTRACTION. He is capable of going in and out of Sam’s club in less than 40 minutes. He is capable of going into Target and coming out with only the one thing that was on his list, and doing it in less than 5 minutes. Very strange.

2. “Nacho Libre” has a 40% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 100% score in our house. If loving this is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

 

3. Instagram=InstaLOVE

I’ve been wrestling with a lack of camera-mojo for a while. Every day photos, especially of my own kids, has always been my passion, but since I started taking photos for clients, I’ve found myself reluctant to pick up the camera in our own house. The idea of getting even further behind in editing---or spending more time in front of the computer---killed my mojo. Enter the iPad and Instagram.

The photos aren’t great, though VSCO and other apps do allow you to separate your focus from your light meter. But that’s part of the joy. I am not going to take any of these photos into Photoshop or Lightroom, so I don’t equate them with more time. And even if I am 4 yrs late to the Instagram party, I’m madly in love. It’s just social enough…no political pronouncements or NYT article links like Facebook (I find those article links hard to resist!). Just pretty photos to inspire.

4. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” was one of the first poems I ever memorized, and I was shocked to learn that lines of it came from Woodsworth’s sister Dorothy’s journal. Based on her writings, it appears she would have been pleased that he used them, so I’m not sure why this shocked me so…or leaves me with so many more questions.

But it has.

5. It’s time to get serious about getting healthy.

My beautiful cousin, Mary Ellen, passed away last week at age 48. She’s in the center of the photo above, along with my cousins Geralyn, Patricia, and Nancy. That’s me in pink in the corner, and possibly my brother John at the bottom.

Mary Ellen had Type 1 diabetes since she was a young girl.

My heart breaks for her daughter, Eileen, losing her mother at such a young age.

I want to be around a long time, and to be healthy while I’m here.

And that’s five lessons so far for 2014.

The Peace of Wild Things

 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For the time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Light52: Week 20

At church a couple weeks ago, we sang "Morning Has Broken." Immediately thought of Leaf, my friend and student at MZMO who chose this song for our staff mix tape. She said at the time that she wanted it played at her funeral, which we all laughed about because it was so in character for Leaf to make such a lovely song morose.

And here I am, all these years later, just learning what she already understood.

"Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning.
Born of the one light Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning;
God's recreation of the new day."

God's re-creation or God's recreation? Or...one and the same.

Light52: Week 19

I first discovered "A Minor Incident" in a book---Nick Hornby wrote about how the song articulated his feelings about his son, who has autism. Ironically the song was written for the movie, About a Boy, based on Hornby's book, which had nothing to do with his son.




Aidan and I were driving around town, down to the river bed and then up behind Sand Flats, so he could collect rocks for a school project, when this song came on. It was an old CD of favorites, but I hadn't heard this song in at least a year, and I found myself weeping. I've listened to it almost daily since then, and love it more each time.

"There's nothing I could say
to make you try to feel okay
and nothing you could do
to stop me feeling the way I do
and if the chance could happen
that I never see you again
Just remember I'll always love you.

I'd be a better person on the other side I'm sure
You'd find away to help yourself, and find another door
to shrug off minor incidence and make us both feel proud
I just wish I could be there to see you through.

You always were the one to make us stand out in a crowd
though every once upon a while your head was in the clouds
There's nothing you could never do to ever let me down
and remember that I'll always love you."

Light52: Week 18

Much of the light in the past few weeks have come from music. Specifically songs I've loved for a very long time, but which recently sound new to me.

In 1989s, a friend gave me a mix tape with an acoustic version of Don Henley's The Heart of the Matter. It's been a favorite ever since, though I've never found the same version. This video---of him singing it with the Eagles is the closest.

"I got the call today that I didn't wanna hear...but I knew that it would come...
What are these voices outside love's open door
Make us throw off our contentment
And beg for something more?

...I'm learning to live without you now, but I miss you sometimes.
The more I know,the less I understand.
All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again.

I've been tryin' to get down
to the Heart of the Matter
but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter
but I think it's about forgiveness."

Light52: Week 8

Source: etsy.com via Linda on Pinterest

The moon shines brightly above my bed.
Frost glitters the ground.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon.
I lower my head and think of home.

Thoughts on a Still Night
by Li Bai
Tang Dynasty ~ some time around 700 AD

We randomly heard this poem on A Child's Garden of Poetry, which I DVR-ed because it listed Liam Neeson as one of the readers and I'm a bit obsessed with his voice ("Fix that hole in your pocket" is randomly repeated around here, from his reading of The Polar Express and the exquisite why he says "pocket"). He read "When You Are Old" by Yeats, which about did me in.

"But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
and loved the sorrows of your changing face."

A young girl recited Li Bai's poem in Chinese and English, and it stayed with me. Days later I looked it up and found a yahoo thread asking why it is so famous. Someone named Kevin pointed out how in four short lines so much is communicated.

I feel like I am out in the wilderness a bit myself, surrounded by frost, and a bit homesick, but I want to focus on how bright the moon is.