From “Be Still in Haste,” by Wendell Berry

How quietly I
begin again

***

Quiet. Beginning.

It’s funny how those two go together, and how often they’re juxtaposed in this season.

“Away in a manger.” “Silent night” (in which “the wondrous gift is given”).

Sabbath is a form of resistance, says Walter Brueggemann: the royal imagination, the status quo, is always acquisitive, pressed for time, scarce of resources. The more it hastens, the more it chafes to go faster; the more it acquires, the more it wants.

Beginnings aren’t loud, and they don’t come with the next acquisition. Not the important ones.

Stop. Look. Listen. What’s being born, quietly, not in haste, out of the spotlight, that could change everything?

Where might we begin again?

From Beach Music, by Pat Conroy

“When I was in a kitchen I could no longer feel the pressure of the world on my shoulders; for me cooking has always been a high form of play, and teaching someone how to make a meal memorable was a combination of thrill and gift that I never tired of giving.”

***

This quotation comes from a book that came to me at a time when I was feeling the pressure of the world much too heavily on my shoulders. As the best books do, it presented itself insistently as if by accident; it was just there, one cheap well-loved novel among many on the anonymous shelf of the borrowed ski condo, demanding to be read.

So I read it during a week of living alone alongside a mountain 10 winters ago, and, slowly, I began to thaw.

The following summer, again in the mountains, I learned the joy of cooking. It’s a high form of play indeed after walking all day with 60 pounds on your back — and the chances of your work being appreciated are that much greater.

Like Pat Conroy’s novels — the rest of which I devoured in the spring and summer after that terrible winter — cooking has remained a lifeline for me ever since. When the world presses down too insistently, I go to the kitchen and play. I get a thrill, and the people I live with get a gift.

From Mink River, by Brian Doyle

We heal things. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re here. We’ve always agreed on that. Right from the start. We do as well as we can. We fail a lot but we keep after it. What else can we do? We have brains that still work so we have to apply them to pain. Brains against pain. That’s the motto. That’s the work. That’s what we do. Soon enough we will not have brains that work, so therefore.

***

Specifically, that’s the motto and mission of the fictional two-man Department of Public Works. No surprise, this department is more in the line of soul work than of sewers and soils and streets and the other public works you might associate with your town’s department of same.

It’s the last morning of finals in my last semester of full-time classes. Thankfully, I have a brain that still works (even when, mid-essay, it doesn’t always feel like it). And as long as I’m wrestling with the question “What is school for?”, “brains against pain” doesn’t seem like a bad answer.

There are more than enough public works to be done in the world. Some of them have to do with infrastructure, which is important; some of them are even more important than that. That’s the work. That’s why we’re here. “People like us do things like this.” What else can we do?

A better definition of “emotional labor” I have yet to find. So therefore.

From “Poem 1129,” by Emily Dickinson (via A Hidden Wholeness, by Parker Palmer)

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

***

“Noticing,” the act which I took as title and frame for this work (mostly, I should admit, because I wanted to start blogging again in a new way and wanted to put a title over it), is, of course, only half the work.

The other half is deciding how to tell what you see. And the more I’ve dug into the practice of blogging (and, this month, my bookshelf of readings that matter), the more I’ve found how deeply I’m influenced by metaphor. From poets like Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson to prose artists like Brian Doyle and Norman Maclean to preachers like Walter Brueggemann and teachers like Seth Godin, the authors whose work has grooved itself most deeply into my own subconscious are all masters of metaphor.

As anyone reading or watching the news knows, approaching the truth head-on can quickly become too much, even when it’s a relatively superficial truth. You can’t catch the capital-T Truth that way. Only by sidling up to it by the slanted path of metaphor can you get close enough to notice something surprising. That’s the handle you grasp, and then try to describe.

From “On People Who Do ‘Great Things,'” by Walter Brueggemann

“[T]he great thing of a king is not like the great thing of the prophet; it is more mundane, more material, seemingly more routine. But he does it. …

“Lean resources make for uncommon transformative power.”

***

One kind of great deed is to give something from plenty. This is magnanimity — the gift of a king. The king does not have to give from what he has, but he can; and, when he deigns to give trivially from his vast holdings, it can mean the world to the recipient.

The other kind is to create something from nothing, to create “enough” where there was not before. Think of the loaves and the fishes: from the meagerest of resources, vast crowds are somehow fed — with leftovers.

As Brueggeman points out in his other work (e.g. The Prophetic Imagination), kings and their “royal consciousness” are the ur-symbols of the status quo. Their rule is quite simply the way things are; every so often, since they control more stuff than anyone else, they choose to work the secular miracle of the status quo ante; that is, they can restore someone’s stuff.

That can indeed be quite a gift, but it is never a transformation in the way things work. A bank error in your favor is a boon to you but doesn’t put the bank out of business. Creating something from nothing, on the other hand, is a generative power that can change the status of things. It is not magnanimity, but a miracle.

Giving from what we have can alleviate someone else’s hardship (or salve our own consciences), but it does not transform the relationship between people. It maintains the status quo. Creating something, though — with presence rather than presents, time and attention rather than stuff — now, that might have uncommon transformative power.

From “A River Runs Through It,” by Norman Maclean

“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them — we can love completely without complete understanding.”

***

I did not completely understand my uncle who died Sunday.

It might be fair to say he eluded me even after sharing so much of life.

Our families were braided together long before I was born, when he and his siblings and my mother were children and my mother was in need and my uncle’s parents, whom I called grandparents, said “We are willing to help” — probably without ever saying so by words.

Like Norman Maclean’s father, my grandfather was a Presbyterian minister who knew and appreciated what was beautiful, though I do not recall him using that word as often as the Reverend Maclean was said to do.

His eldest son was also a man who cared far more than he was ever able to put into words (at least in my hearing).

I wish I’d known my uncle better. But I always understood that he and his family had understood need when it really mattered, and had known how to respond to it with an open door and an extra place at the table, forever.

Much eluded me, but I completely understand how important that family’s generosity has been in the story of my own family. And I trust my uncle understood that, too.

From “Prayer in Reluctant but Abashed Hesitant Appreciation of Death,” by Brian Doyle

“Oddly it’s not my eventual death that frightens and nags me; I have had a glorious blessed hilarious graced life, and no man was ever so slathered with love and laughter as me, and when my time to dissolve comes, I hope to remember that I was granted a long and colorful run; indeed I hope to spend eons happily reviewing the tape, minute by minute, paying even more attention to the infinitesimal details than I did the first time, and replaying the highlights again and again, driving my new roommates nuts. No: it’s the death of people I love that ravages me.”

***

As Krista Tippett says, we are all always just a phone call away from grief.

Yesterday, walking along the river to the reservoir deep in good conversation with a good friend, I missed the call from my brother. Upon returning to the house, I found the text messages, and called him back, and learned that my uncle — eldest son of my grandmother — who had retired in July and healthily happily hosted Thanksgiving for us this year like every year, had died that afternoon.

A loss like this makes me even more grateful for the rainout of a few weeks ago. There’s no way to be truly ready for a thing like this, but at least an earlier reprieve when we needed it is allowing my family to respond to this new need.

And, as ever, I am reminded that we are not given to know the length of our run, so the best we can do is to make it colorful — to slather and be slathered with all the love and laughter we can muster, and to hope for a decent interval between phone calls.

From “Crows” by Marilyn Nelson

“What if to taste and see, to notice things,
to stand each is up against emptiness
for a moment or an eternity—
images collected in consciousness
like a tree alone on the horizon—
is the main reason we’re on the planet.”

***

Marilyn Nelson is the dining companion you always wished for.

To share a meal with her is to share not only the quiet firm insistence on the purpose of being captured in these lines (notice how the sentence is posed as a question but ends as an assertion?) but also the quick wit and ready laugh of a person who has looked life in the eye and decided she’s in on the joke.

You can read the rest of this poem here, or — much better — you can listen to it and a few others here.

To spend time with Marilyn is to taste and see and notice things that were always there but maybe you couldn’t describe or you’d forgotten how to see for having seen them so often. Like how sometimes a taxi can be “faster than light.”

What if … that’s true.

From the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 6:11–12

“When circumstances force you to some sort of distress, quickly return to yourself. Do not stay out of rhythm for longer than you must: you will master the harmony the more by constantly going back to it.

“… So return to philosophy again and again, and take your comfort in her: she will make the other life seem bearable to you, and you bearable in it.”

***

When I was introduced to philosophy, especially the classics and most especially the Stoics, it was frequently (if not primarily) framed as consolation and guide.

This passage is a perfect example: this morning got started on the wrong foot, so the question instantly became how long I’d stay out of rhythm. I flipped the Meditations open at random and found this at the beginning of Book 6. And not only did it provide an inspiration for today’s writing, but it also offered consolation and guidance as to what to do with the rest of the day.

Stoicism, that most caricatured guide to life, was historically the no-nonsense philosophy of rulers and powerful people in private business. Even today, you don’t have to scratch the surface of Silicon Valley and self-improvement podcasts very deeply to find its influence; just reading these lines again this morning, I was instantly reminded of something Tony Robbins said on the Tim Ferriss Show about deciding that he wasn’t going to let anything interrupt his “beautiful state” for more than a minute. When something went wrong, he’d give himself exactly 60 seconds to get angry and give vent, and then he’d put the past behind him and move on.

If that sounds either harsh or unrealistic, here’s another way of thinking about it: philosophy can provide what Seth Godin frequently calls “guardrails” around how to live. Once you’ve decided that the Meditations are the standard, even a quick dip back into the text can re-establish a broken rhythm and rescue the rest of the day.

It’s too hard to start ab initio every time something goes wrong. Things go wrong too often, and it takes too long to get back in tune by guesswork alone. The Meditations provide a consistent wavelength in life, which provides both warning when I’m out of tune and consolation by making it possible to return again and again to the wavelength that feels right.

From Markings, by Dag Hammarskjöld

“I am being driven forward / Into an unknown land. / The pass grows steeper, / The air colder and sharper. / A wind from my unknown goal / Stirs the strings / Of expectation.

“Still the question: / Shall I ever get there? / There where pure life resounds, / A clear pure note / In the silence.”

***

Not bad work for a 20-year-old economist, is it?

This poem is the first entry in Dag Hammarskjöld’s diary, published as Markings after his death. It’s stunning to read when you know what book you’re holding. I can only imagine how it struck Swedish Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Leif Belfrage when he lifted the cover note addressed personally to him on the original manuscript discovered in Hammarskjöld’s home in New York after his death.

We are all of us being driven forward into an unknown land, whether we feel it as acutely as the young Hammarskjöld or not. These days, of course, it doesn’t exactly require a master’s degree in a related field to feel the unknowing and the steepening, the colder and the sharper.

Then again, that’s what these weeks are all about: will we get there? What will happen when we do?

How will we be marked by the journey?