Clearing
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself to this world
so worthy of rescue.
I love this poem by Martha Postlethwaite because it makes apparent the tensions in cultivating spiritual life. Although I believe we are fundamentally all spiritual beings having a human experience, there is a lot of competition for our attention. Spiritual life is not just going to happen. We have to take affirmative steps – we have to create a clearing in the dense forests of our lives. But then we have to be still. We have to patiently wait. It is not about moving on to the next task of creating the song. It is about making space to hear it. Then we will know how to do the next right thing in this broken and beautiful world.
Creating a clearing sounds productive and satisfying. But quietly waiting? And listening without knowing what I’m trying to hear? I think of a story author Martha Beck tells. Beck’s middle child, Adam, was born with Down syndrome. When Adam was very young Beck, who holds a B.A., master’s degree, and Ph.D. from Harvard, was bound and determined to make sure Adam began speaking by a certain age. Her understanding was that if Adam didn’t speak by a certain age, he likely never would. She prodded, coached, and relentlessly worked to help Adam learn to speak. One day, she had basically given up when Adam handed her a rose and said, “Here.”
Or at least that was Beck’s initial understanding of what Adam said. After a moment, she realized that he was asking her to “Hear.” Beck had been so consumed with a data point that she was missing The Point. In her ceaseless doing, she was not able to Hear.
Living Deliberately
My husband Case and I practice living a death-informed life, or “living with the end in mind,” as Barbara Becker calls it in her book Heartwood. This way of living feels clarifying, not dark and scary, because it makes sure we keep The Point in mind. If I don’t live this way, I worry I’ll get distracted by shiny things and forget what I’m really here to do. There are so many things demanding our attention and there will never be enough time. This is my version of what Henry David Thoreau was talking about in Walden when he said “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
This lesson feels particularly strong for me now that I am nearing 44. Our culture would have us be distracted by stuff or by doing. It would have us spend our time developing and perfecting our little clearing in the woods. Although there is nothing wrong with tending to the stuff of life, and even enjoying doing so, I have to make sure I am not only doing that because it leaves me with the kind of hollow reassurance Tim Kreider wrote about in “The ‘Busy’ Trap” nearly 14 years ago. Kreider notes, “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
“There are so many gifts still unopened from your birthday; there are so many handcrafted presents that have been sent to you by God.”
– 14th century Persian poet Hafiz
It can be scary to get still and listen to the song that is our life because, depending on what we hear, we might have to be brave and make some changes. However, the opportunity to live the song that is my life feels worth it. Practically speaking, what it sounds like right now is letting some things go undone or get done less well so that I can explore having fun. Embarrassingly, it has been hard to figure out what exactly fun is. I have a tricky relationship with the word. As a sensitive introvert who lives in the deep end, doesn’t drink alcohol, and makes her family run smoothly, I often don’t feel “fun.”
To explore this, I’m reading The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again by Catherine Price. Price defines fun as a combination of playfulness, connection, and flow. Clearly, I can make an earnest and dogged project out of anything, and I am suspicious of my impulse to turn fun into a study. I think I’m on track, though, because my initial approach is to start noticing all the ways I already have fun in my life. It’s not about doing more, or doing things the right way. It’s about waking up to what is already, gloriously, here.
