From “Ignorance,” by Billy Collins

“And to think further that I have no idea / what might have uplifted me, / unless it was when I first opened / the front door to look at the sky / so extensive and burdened with snow, / or was it this morning / when I walked along the reservoir?”

***

This morning I did not walk along the reservoir. Instead, I used the rowing machine recently received from my uncle, whose son the poet gave this book to my grandmother, from whose shelves I acquired it after her death.

“EX LIBRIS V. WIEMAN, IN MEM.”, says the title page in the blocky capitals I use when I want to be legible later (even in Latin). Only later, when I began to read it, did I find my cousin’s looping hand a few pages in. “To Grandmother, here are some of my favorites! P. 69. P. 63. P. 47. Merry Christmas!”

An odd sort of re-gift, isn’t it? Some unknown number of Christmases later, I receive the gift of the memory of my grandmother, and an unexpected connection to my cousin. I never knew we had a favorite poet in common. I wonder if my grandmother, the minister’s wife who steadfastly did not believe in any sort of afterlife, knows that I know that now. It makes me smile to think she might.

This evening, or tomorrow maybe, when I next walk along the reservoir, I’ll offer thanks for this unexpected and uplifting gift of Christmas past. I hope that will make her smile, too.

From “The Monk Manifesto,” by Christine Valters Paintner

“I commit to cultivating community by finding kindred spirits along the path, soul friends with whom I can share my deepest longings, and mentors who can offer guidance and wisdom for the journey.”

***

Just such a friend, mentor, and guide just sent me this manifesto the other day. “I’m sending you something by email,” she texted. Moments later came the email, entitled “Add to your reading list.”

The friend and guide is one of the oldest tropes in our tradition. From the classical notion of “one soul living in two bodies” to Yoda, philosophy and mythical archetypes have long reserved a special role for the kindred spirit who shows the way.

In The Lord of the Rings, the elvish queen Galadriel takes a turn on stage as friend and guide to the Fellowship of the Ring. And, when the hobbits journey onward from Lothlorien, she sends with them slices of lembas, the magical elvish bread that can provide a day’s sustenance from a the smallest nibble.

All the metaphors in this excerpt imply journey and motion save one: cultivating. Somehow, in the midst of all of life’s constant motion, we are challenged to slow down and cultivate.

It’s hard to find the time. Of course it is. But friendships are the source of lembas in life: a little cultivation, a small taste here and there, can sustain us through the gravest difficulties.

So I encourage you to add this to your reading list, too. And I offer thanks for the friend who cared enough to send it to me.

From “Oysters,” by Seamus Heaney

“… I ate the day / Deliberately that its tang / Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.”

***

Deliberation and action.

Deliberation in action.

Themes of poets throughout time, and redolent of the idea of “contemplation in action” ingrained deep within us at Georgetown.

We tend to be more comfortable in one mode versus the other, but life keeps asking us to learn how to do both, and to hold them in tension. Action without deliberation is aimless and frequently destructive. Deliberation that never leads to action is pointless and can be destructive in its way.

So here’s to the tang of the day, and the determination to taste it and be quickened into verb.

And thanks for independent bookstores, the communities that support them, and people who make an event out of visiting them. Deliberating amidst shelves and pages remains the best way to go slow to go fast.

From “Mindful,” by Mary Oliver

“Every day / I see or I hear / something / that more or less / kills me / with delight, / that leaves me / like a needle / in the haystack / of light.”

***

That’s really what mindfulness is, isn’t it?

Slowing down, sitting still, paying attention closely enough to see a little sliver of the magic all around.

Mary Oliver always brings to mind a decade of mind-melding with a best friend from college. This summer, we took a road trip and share poetry in the tent at night. I read a bunch of Brian Doyle, and she shared much of Mary Oliver, our old muse.

And that’s delight: a friend, a hike, a book, the fullness of a warm meal cooked with no recipe over a single burner, a tent on the beach by the redwood forest.

The realization that, in the grand scheme of the universe, we’re not even a needle in the haystack.

From “Muttered Prayer in Thanks for the Under-Genius of Christmas,” by Brian Doyle

“… I saw the under-genius of it all; I saw beneath the tinsel and nog, the snarl of commerce and the ocean of misspent money; I saw the quiet pleasure of ritual, the actual no-kidding no-fooling urge to pause and think about other people and their joy, the anticipation of days spent laughing and shouldering in the kitchen, with no agenda and no press of duty. I saw the flash of peace and love under all the shrill selling and tinny theater; and I was thrilled and moved. … [A]nd I finished untangling the epic knot of lights, shivering yet again with happiness that we were given such a sweet terrible knot of a world to untangle, as best we can, with bumbling love. And so: amen.”

***

To paraphrase an old Jesuit professor at Georgetown, Brian Doyle is the author of a good number of books to keep sane by. Sadly, the number is not what I would wish: he died in the spring of 2017, not quite a year after our paths magically crossed one evening in a tiny town in southeast Alaska.

During his reading at the National Park visitors’ center that evening, he said that a reviewer once wrote that someone should put a bunch of periods in a box and ship them to him, the author. Today, I am grateful that we still have authors who care enough to ramble, who have not yet given in to the breathless conjunction-starting sentences of shrill selling, and who can pull it off with melody and poetry in the best Irish style, so that by the time you reach the end, you arrive grateful for the pause in the journey and not exhausted by all the staccato periods that have come before.

And so, Brian, wherever you are, I raise a glass of pinot noir in your general direction, a chara, and say go raibh mile maith agat — a thousand thanks, or, more poetically, may a thousand good things go your way. May you “travel in beauty,” as you once wished me.

And may the rest of us, still trying as best we can to untangle the epic knots of this world, pause for a moment amidst the tinny theater to see the under-genius of it all, as you did, and be thrilled and moved, and shiver with awe.

There’s a great line in the movie Bull Durham: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”

Yesterday, we got the rainout we needed. As in the movie, it was a manmade natural disaster.

I can still clearly recall an old church bulletin that was stuck to the fridge with a magnet for years of my childhood. On the front, it had a quotation attributed to the baseball manager Sparky Anderson: “Grace is when you get what you don’t deserve. Mercy is when you don’t get what you do deserve.”

Turning on the sprinklers to get the rainout you need is somewhere in between. Today, I’m grateful for the rainout.

***

Hat-tip to Callie Oettinger at stevenpressfield.com for the inspiration for this post.

Today is the first day of Advent — a perfect time to kick off a series of reflections on gratitude. For the next 24 days, I’ll offer a tiny snippet of lectio divina of a favorite author’s work, with an overall theme of gratitude. Today, in addition to the rainout, I’m grateful for the person who first introduced me to “Bull Durham.”

No, really — how do you know?

I sat in on a class the other day when someone ventured what amounted to a faith-based argument that GDP growth is always good and decline always bad.

“How do you know?” demanded the professor.

“Uh, um … because it’s good?”

We never did get a satisfying answer. That doesn’t necessarily mean growth isn’t good, or even that it’s bad. But it does mean that skepticism is warranted toward received wisdom, premises, and shibboleths.

When the tools for blurring or slurring the truth get more sophisticated and widespread every day, the premium on knowing what you know and how goes up. A little reading or listening on epistemology can go a long way. Ask your “five whys.” Ask what could falsify your belief or change your mind.

Ask yourself constantly, “How do you know what you know?”

There’s a line I’ve always loved in Bruce Springsteen’s song “Long Time Comin’:”

“If I had one wish in this godforsaken world, kids / it’d be that your mistakes would be your own; / yeah, that your sins would be your own.”

I was recently out for drinks with a good friend and her parents, and she raised some pretty sharp disagreements with the way her parents have built and managed their investments over the years. And, to her great credit, she’s already making different decisions — with which her parents disagree in their way.

I’ve had versions of this conversation with my own parents more times than I can count. And every time I do, this Springsteen line runs through my head: after all, life would be so much easier if we didn’t inherit any messes.

But of course that’s not the way of this godforsaken world. At best, each generation makes the best decisions they can with the information, opportunities, and values they have — and the following generations do the same (often in opposition to their apparently benighted parents).

Outright avarice is one thing, and of course it’s a very real thing. But there are a lot of people out there who genuinely are trying to do what’s best by themselves and their children — who then turn and point out just how little they saw and how wrong they were.

This type of conflict comes up all the time. Resent and recrimination are always tempting, but they don’t really help anything. The past might not be past, but it certainly cannot be changed. The only thing that can be is the future: like the narrator of Springsteen’s lyrics, we can wish life were otherwise, know we’re doomed to repeat the pattern ourselves — and yet bring new life into the world, promising ourselves we “ain’t gonna f**k it up this time.”

Just what are you sharing, with whom, on which platforms?

Why?

We all know that, like reality TV, social network feeds use artifacts of real life to construct something that’s not really real.

But still the seemingly unrelenting push for more sharing, more soul-baring.

It’s worth pausing to ask for a moment: who’s really asking for that?

And, if it’s really your network asking for more details (the better to target your ads with!), is that a game you’re really so eager to play?

Professionalism requires a certain degree of performance: the concert or game starts at the scheduled time, the book or movie wraps on deadline, and the work is shipped when promised — whether the professional who creates it felt like it or not.

Performance is a powerful force. The best work — the best performances — can transport us out of ourselves, or beyond where we are now. That’s why we buy the tickets, read the books, cast the votes.

The question, then, is where to draw the line between what’s manufactured and what’s genuine in the performance — and what we expect professionals to fall along that spectrum in performance of their work.

Too mechanical, and people might not buy what you’re selling. Too disingenuous, however, and you risk being a huckster.

Keep performing — and ensure that your performance respects both yourself and the people you serve.