Look at her, checking her watch again, worried there’s not enough time. Not enough minutes or hours to do all the urgent or beautiful things she longs to do— a list that unspools out of each second— all those things she is certain must be done. She how she squirms, how she bites her lip, as if her unease will make time open up like a peony. Oh sweetheart who I have lived with for years, who I have sometimes mistaken for myself, I see you. It is so easy right now to be easy with you, a relief, really, not to judge you for your worry, but to love you for how deeply you care, how much you want to be in service. There is a time outside of time in which you exist, this timelessness from which I am watching you–imagine a lake with no shore. A night with no dawn. A self with no sense of where she might end.
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ~
Every morning, I’m greeted by three poems in my inbox. The most recentregular arrival is from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, self-named WordWoman. I love the simplicity of her writing. Accessible. Lyrical. Evocative. Most every one of her poems, I slip into my “keeper” file to pass forward, like I did last week in my writers’ circle. Like I am here, this morning, with you.
I’m touched by this poem’s tenderness. Referring to her little self as “sweetheart,” something I say regularly to myself. Encouraging her/me to slow down, pause, breathe. Noticing the worry. Reassuring her/me that there’s enough time to do what needs to get done.
I love this poem for seeing how we care and for naming that it’s because we care so much and so deeply, we worry.
I’m soothed by the reminder that my big self is always watching my small self from that timeless place, between the knowing and the not knowing, where infinite possibilities reside.
In yesterday’s inbox, I received two emails that struck me as contrasting approaches to coping with the current global state of affairs. In one, subject line: Sanity Repair Kit, its author listed thirteen personal strategies to help her stay above despair. The second, the weekly love note from Christine Valters Paintner, abbess of the online contemplative-creative community Abbey of the Arts, opened with the 6th principle of its Monk Manifesto:
“I commit to rhythms of rest and renewal through the regular practice of Sabbath and resist a culture of busyness that measures my worth by what I do.”
Deep, holy breath in and out…I could feel my body relax into the truth of rest being, as Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, writes: an act of resistance in a culture that wants to exploit and deplete our labor so others can profit. Could this be more on point at this time when we’re told that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization?
While the first email’s list included practices I know I could be doing, should be doing, and am doing – more or less – mostly, I felt overwhelmed and out of breath …except for the invitation to stare off into the sky for several seconds or minutes. Something I do quite regularly, sitting in my living room, often with Walker sleeping there in the sunshine. I understand “different strokes for different folks,” yet I want to uplift here an appreciation for and the wisdom in doing no-thing.
Suddenly, I am remembering with a smile the story I used to read during staff inservices, written by Robert Fulghum of the All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten fame. I no longer have that well-marked, tabbed, and dog-eared copy, but it was his experience of taking a pair of favorite leather shoes to the shoemaker for resoling that captures the essence of doing no-thing. He writes:
“The shoe repair guy returned with my shoes in a stapled brown bag. For carrying, I thought. When I opened the bag at home that evening, I found two gifts and a note. In each shoe, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in waxed paper. And these words in the note: ‘Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it. Elias Schwartz.’”
“Sabbath is not a doing, but a way of being in the world… In those spaces of rest comes renewal, with dreams for new possibilities. As a culture we face so many issues that feel impossible to tackle in meaningful ways. One way to begin is to allow enough space for visions to enter, to step back and see what happens when we slow down our pace first. . . .”
Christine Valters Paintner
Part of my Sabbath often includes cooking a good, ample meal giving us leftovers to get through the beginning of the week. With classical music or relaxing jazz streaming in the background and an occasional glass of wine, I’m in my element. Too, writing my Monday blog, warmly ensconced in my studio, surrounded by my various creative endeavors, inspiring images, vision boards and books, I sink into the wellspring of potential beneath the heartlessly cruel rhetoric filling so much airspace today.
Years ago, before The Abbey of the Arts, or The Nap Ministry, my friend Christina Baldwin penned the exquisite Seven Whispers (2002). “Move at the pace of guidance,” is the second whisper, combining two instructions: to re-humanize our speed of life, and to use a slower pace to actively listen for spiritual guidance.
“The pace of guidance, like peace of mind, begins internally – in me. Even though all my conditioning teaches me to accommodate speed, I am responsible for the pace I bring to the moment, just as I am responsible for the peace I bring to the moment.”
Christina Baldwin
What chocolate chip cookies might we find as we allow and settle into a slower pace and use this overwhelming and despairing time to do no-thing? What visions of possibility and inner wisdom might we access by resting and resetting our overwrought nervous systems? What might be the outcome of such a bold, strategic act of resistance?
“We must hang onto our humanity, it is why we’re in the world.”
Christina Baldwin
Much love, kindest regards, and moments of deep and abiding rest, dear friends.
Each moment of rest, of doing no-thing, of being our own Sabbath matters. Each word, each photograph, each email matters. Each kind word, each warm embrace matters. It’s what we have which I have to believe can turn the tide, perhaps first within the unseen, liminal spaces.
A Wabi Sabi Life 