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Days of Awe — Walk

I am taking another dip into a Day of Awe.

It was raining today. Is this a day to stay inside? Today’s rain leaves me chilled. I pull out one of my quilts, curl up with Sue — one of our dogs — and notice what cozy feels like. Cozy is a beautifully subtle Darjeeling tea.

Photo by Inge Maria on Unsplash

 

As the rain has stopped, I can take a step out into the hushed world. The clouds bring everything closer. I carry a poem with me to remind me why:

I Happened To Be Standing
by Mary Oliver

I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

Today my practice is an awe walk. My dogs remind me that everyday is an important awe-walk day. I don’t go far, around our block and down by the lake. I approach my surroundings with fresh eyes. I live in a suburban neighbourhood and I see ordinary features transformed into something more extraordinary. Today two white-tailed doe bound across an empty lot towards the forest beside the train tracks.

When you look with new eyes, what do you see?

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Literary Food

I stumbled upon a poem as I skipped through the internet today. It was accompanied by a recipe.  It was on a website called EatThisPoem.com. For some reason my mind went immediately to Alice In Wonderland’s Mad Hatter’s tea party.  It felt like a grown up tea party where imagination came together with food.

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and the talking over its head. `Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,’ thought Alice; `only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.’

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: `No room! No room!’ they cried out when they saw Alice coming. `There’s PLENTY of room!’ said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

`Have some wine,’ the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. `I don’t see any wine,’ she remarked.

`There isn’t any,’ said the March Hare.

`Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,’ said Alice angrily.

`It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,’ said the March Hare.

`I didn’t know it was YOUR table,’ said Alice; `it’s laid for a great many more than three.’

–perhaps it was the raspberry jam…

Cornmeal Pancakes Strawberry Chia Jam via Eat This Poem
http://www.eatthispoem.com/blog/cornmeal-pancakes-pretty-simple-cooking

The Corn Baby

by Mark Wunderlich

They brought it. It was brought
from the field, the last sheaf, the last bundle

the latest and most final armful. Up up
over the head, hold it, hold it high, it held

the gazer’s gaze, it held hope, did hold it.
Through the stubble of September, on shoulders

aloft, hardly anything, it weighed, like a sparrow,
it was said, something winged, hollow, though

pulsing, freed from the field
where it flailed in wind, where it waited, wanted

to be found and bound with cord. It had
limbs, it had legs. And hands. It had fingers.

Fingers and a face peering from the stalks,
shuttered in the grain, closed, though just a kernel

a shut corm. They brought him and autumn
rushed in, tossed its cape of starlings,

tattered the frost-spackled field.

—From Poetry (March 2009)

 

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Days of Awe

Can I start with dreams of spring to inspire days of awe? Cherry blossom tea is brings reflection.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I have had to take off my rose-coloured glasses. I am languishing. Decisions are being made that will affect me and I can’t do anything about it. I can put one foot in front of the other and deal with the consequences of other’s decisions. And I need a purpose injection.

Then this poem came through my inbox, I paused:

The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry

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

This poem reminds me that I have the ability to infuse grace into my world. I am languishing because I am just going through the motions without a lot of emotion or interest. I can keep busy and that busyness is devoid of meaning. My busy life has kept me awe-deficient.

I am here to change that. I am reminding myself that I choose how I show up in the world and I want to experience what Einstein called the most beautiful thing by practicing awe.

Awe is when life grants us the chance to think differently and deeper about itself, so that we are not left squandering its gift by languishing it away.

The benefit for me to practice awe, as science suggests, is to increase my life satisfaction, have a sense of time slowing down or stopping, and feeling interconnected with others. I want that, especially today.

Today, I am practicing awe. Not the trivial awe of “Wow, I found ten bucks in my pocket!” but the real awe that is “ an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful…”

Today, my awe practice is an easy way to start. I want to infuse awe into my day and appointments today kept me languishing. Instead of waiting to start tomorrow, I set aside five minutes after breakfast to watch a awe-inspiring video. The video when given all my attention on full screen mode gives a sense of vastness in the world and puts into perspective my small place in it. It expands my sense of wonder.

Give it a try:

Taking time out of my routine to experience awe lifts me out of the usual day-to-day concerns and connects me to something larger.

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Five Lessons I Learned Not Dying

I have not thought of my life as one of an experience of “not dying.” I sometimes joke with my husband that he has given God plenty of opportunities to kill him, and he is still here. He must not be done with him yet. Have I the same privilege? In reading Maggie O’Farrell’s new memoir, I am I am I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, that is the understanding that I have. I have not died yet. I am not done.

I am fortunate–I can truly say that–that I have not experienced any near-death events. I suppose my brushes with death are more figurative. They are there.

There is nothing unique or special in a near-death experience. They are not rare; everyone, I would venture, has had them, at one time or another, perhaps without even realising it. The brush of a van too close to your bicycle, the tired medic who realises that a dosage ought to be checked one final time, the driver who has drunk too much and is reluctantly persuaded to relinquish the car keys, the train missed after sleeping through an alarm, the aeroplane not caught, the virus never inhaled, the assailant never encountered, the path not taken. We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.” (pg 31-32)

I could be trite and say that the lessons I have learned from not dying are, like:

  • live everyday as if it is your last
  • be grateful for what you have
  • enjoy the journey

But, I don’t live my life like that, all the time (I am grateful for a close parking spot during Christmas shopping).

What I do know is this:

  1. Life does go on.
    In the moment, something can loom large and I don’t see a way out of its shadow. There is and I do. And, the angst I felt finding a boyfriend in bed with someone else when I was 25, doesn’t even register now that I am 55.
  2. Small moments need to be savoured.
    Most days my family rolls their eyes when I present one more sunrise picture from the bridge. Each sunrise is special even as I am anticipating the next one, and even if it does happen everyday.
  3. Time passes differently for everyone.
    Time passes in a flash for my husband. Thirty doesn’t seem that long ago for him and eighty doesn’t seem so far away. Time stretches languidly in both directions for me. I like that I feel like life saunters. Our two perspectives means that we treat time differently, and I haven’t been able to teach my husband to flip to my way of viewing time. Maybe I don’t need to.
  4. Healthy is better than wealthy.
    There is joy in taking care of yourself and others. Preparing a delicious meal or relishing a deer stretch in yoga are simple pleasures that help me to feel life deeply.
  5. Nurture family altruism.
    I was helping my daughter with her philosophy homework reading an article by Steven Pinker about altruism and social contract. He referred to nepotistic altruism as the act of doing something good so that our genes survive. I don’t think I would reduce what I do with and for my family down to such scientific rational. And I would do anything to help my genes survive (even read Plato and Hume). Perhaps that is the evolutionary argument for love. Families are like a petri dish for the world. We learn about ourselves and how to treat others in each of our family experiments. As it is in the microcosm, so it is in the macrocosm.

I have had the blessed fortune not to die. I must ensure that I live.

I consider myself steeped in luck, in good fortune… I have been showered with shamrocks, my pockets filled with rabbits feet, found the crock of gold at the end of every rainbow. I could not have asked for more from life, to have been spared with might have been. (page 241)