Uncategorized

At This Darkest Time of the Year

/ eachholyhour / Leave a comment

Dear Friends,
These weeks before Christmas, I find my shoulders steadily inching toward my earlobes. My mind’s a hive, abuzz with lists.

Turns out, I need a deep breath. Will you take one with me?

[Pause]

Phew! I needed that. That breath might be the most important thing I’ve done all day. Every year, I’m struck with the discrepancy between the frenetic holiday season and what’s happening in the natural world at this northern latitude. While we’re out “getting and spending,” nature is conserving energy, paring back, hunkering down. For all the technologies and comforts that seem to elevate us above nature, we’re still a corporeal species with a deep, instinctive desire for slowness, abeyance, and quiet at this darkest time of the year.

In my Episcopal tradition, these creaturely instincts are preserved in the four weeks before Christmas, the short season of Advent. In embracing the darkness and holding space for quiet, Advent invites an inward turn. Perhaps at no time of the year are our acquisitive habits more on display than during the holiday spending spree. Advent is a counterpoint to this cultural excess. It asks of us inquisitiveness rather than acquisitiveness. Among the inquiries of Advent: What really nourishes me? For what truly good thing do I yearn? If God were to come disguised as my life, would I have the eyes to see?

While store windows are aglitter with promises of material fulfillment, Advent’s spareness bestows a different type of gain. It allows me to hear the muffled eloquence of footsteps in snow or feel the simple, sharp exhilaration of a breath in winter. And it is through the darkness of Advent that the small pinpricks of light — starlight, candle flame, alpenglow on the mountainside — are revealed as truly consequential and glorious.

I hope that in these hustling days you find a few Advent moments to sit in the silent company of a flickering candle, to walk beneath the barren trees of winter, to gaze through the darkness at the miracle of stars above. To breathe.

Peace,

Lindsay

p.s. Since Kim and I both delight in children’s books, we thought we’d list some of our favorites to read at this time of the year. Short and centering, perhaps one of these will usher in an Advent moment.

Recommendations from Kim:

The Clown of God by Tomie de Paola:  Based on an Italian legend, this beautifully illustrated book is a wonder and brings me to tears every time I read it. (Me too! – Lindsay)

A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas: This is such a great read-aloud, sure to evoke wistfulness and many chuckles.

The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumor Godden and Barbara Cooney: You’re probably familiar with this classic, but this version is exceptionally told, with the magic of Cooney’s gorgeous artwork.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: this story has become almost a trope, but the original glitters with deep meaning and beauty. Try listening to  this fabulous audiobook version in the car as an alternative to Christmas radio!

Recommendations from Lindsay:

A Northern Nativity by William Kurelek: My all time favorite Christmas book. Spare folk art drawings paired with short visions of the Holy Family in various northern landscapes. It asks the question: “If it happened here as it happened there, if it happened now as it happened then, who would have seen the miracle? Who would have brought gifts? Who would have taken Them in?”

How Brown Mouse Kept Christmas by Clyde Watson: While this little book is a simple, sweet story, it’s real value is in pitch perfect observance of tiny moments, rendered in beautiful prose.

The Church Mice at Christmas by Graham Oakley: Like all the books in this series, this one is a perfect pairing of understated British humor and hilariously detailed drawings. A thorough pleasure.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson: In my opinion, no Christmas book list can be complete without this classic where humor paves the way to wonder and a sense of what is truly holy.

On Your Own Behalf

/ eachholyhour / 2 Comments

Dear Friends,

Pinned to the bulletin board above my desk is a quote from Jane Austen: “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.” I keep this curious sentence in view because I find it an excellent crystallization of a truth I’m learning to live by: that tremendous effort is sometimes necessary to access things that are good for me.

Today, I awoke feeling like I was looking at my life through the wrong end of a telescope. On my morning walk, usually a centering routine, the autumny yellows waving from a patch of aspen seemed dull, the slanting sunlight a reproach.

All morning I reached for another cup of tea or a piece of chocolate to banish the banality. I listlessly moved my to-do list around the counter, half-heartedly starting projects and dropping them, managing mainly to be ineffectual. My mood seemed to buffet me at every turn.

Finally, and with titanic energy, I pulled on my running shoes and forced myself out the door. For the first quarter of an hour the aspen’s yellow still seemed dishwater dull.

But after awhile everything began to brighten. The wrong-end-of-the-telescope feeling diminished. Each stride landed me more in my body, more pax with the familiar world I love. Suddenly, with clarity, I recalled a friend’s text sent many months ago when I was in a similar drifty, purposeless space: “It is amazing the miracle balm that is ACTION on your own behalf.”

This is a lesson I have to learn and relearn all the time. Why is it so hard at times to do the things we know deepen our lives, to adhere to practices that ground us? In the past decade, through a lot of trial and error and listening to my experience, I have learned decisively that everything is better in my heart and mind if I plonk myself at my desk and work on crafting another chapter of my manuscript. Or if I go on a trail run. Or, if possible, both. Though this formula could not be simpler, I still have to talk myself into these actions on my own behalf. Even with years of practice, it doesn’t come easily.

It would be far less complicated, I suppose, if we were just plain good at choosing the things that fill us up, that pay out dividends in our hearts and minds. But, in my experience, these are the very things about which I drag my feet and invent excuses to avoid.

The point is this: it’s hard work, this business of being alive in the world. Let no one tell you differently. The work is real. There are no shortcuts to fulfillment, no arrival at some halcyon space where you get to stay. There are just decisions, day after day, on how to use the time you’re given. Some days those decisions seem easy. Some days they are taken with great effort.

How grateful I am for those times when, pushing through, I write on till I am back in humor with the practice, or run on until I can appreciate the autumn light winking in the aspens.

Peace,
Lindsay

p.s.  My formula for action on my own behalf is a trail run and writing. What’s yours? Share it with us here by leaving a reply below.

Consider: Already/Not Yet

/ eachholyhour / 2 Comments

Dear Friends-

Last night it rained, a serious, no-nonsense rain, thrumming against the windows and glugging in the downspouts. There was no mistaking it for summer’s passing showers. This was an earnest rain, autumn’s first full-throated announcement.

This wet morning, I walked the dogs through a different world: same trail, new palette. The ponderosa trunks were rain-black. The broad-bladed grasses lay silvered and flattened. Along the trail, lacy blue clusters of elderberries dripped bright drops, and rosehips, the waxy red of a child’s crayon, presented themselves for the picking. The grasshoppers, which yesterday had scattered before the dogs like sparks struck from flint, had disappeared entirely. Instead, crows cawed overhead and a lone doe raised a wary neck as we passed.

What is it about the change of seasons that is so exhilarating? Why does the crispness in the air send that little hopeful frisson shivering through me? I’m not even clear about what I’m hopeful for, or if hope is the right word. But this morning each rain-glazed leaf seems intricately beautiful (as, surely, it always has been, had I eyes to see) and everything – including me – seems on the verge of becoming more deeply itself.

It’s a funny thing: this idea of becoming more deeply oneself. How can you be more –well, you?

There’s a complexity at the heart of this question; some sense that we are not yet all we are meant to be. In the faith tradition in which I was raised, this tension is called the “Already/Not-yet.” It holds that by virtue of being alive, we already participate in the divine. And yet, at the same time, our participation has not yet come into fullness. In essence, we are and are becoming.

I think it was this idea that I caught sight of while walking among the rain-sharpened colors this morning, as if somehow this daily walk had, overnight, closed the space between what is and what is possible. As the dogs furrowed among wet foxtail and timothy, the distance between the Already and Not Yet seemed diminished. That deeper, truer version of being shimmered almost everywhere.

Peace,
Lindsay

Consider: Solitude Invites Us

/ eachholyhour / 2 Comments

Dear Friends,

They are here again: the arrowleaf balsamroots.

I’ve been watching closely these last months, since the deep snow of this past winter finally allowed itself to be whittled away. It was a relief when open ground emerged then tentatively greened. Along the trail, silvery nodes extricated themselves from mud, then shot up, unfurling silver broad leaves. Now, sun-yellow flowers stud the whole hillside above my house. The dogs and I take our morning constitutional. A slight breeze stirs. The yellow heads of the balsamroot bob and nod, agreeing it seems with the goodness of the morning, of springtime, of life itself.

I tell you all this because for months things have been hard.

In Western Montana, our February, averaging just 16 degrees, was the coldest since 1898.  It snowed Every. Single. Day. Not heaps and heaps. Just enough to require substantial shovel work. Under an unvaried, cheerless sky, I cleared the driveway and sidewalks, re-doing work I had toiled over the day before. And the day before that. And the day before that. In the midst of those seemingly interminable February days, my husband had knee surgery, my daughter the flu, my son switched middle schools, my puppy chewed holes in the carpet, my novel got rejected – again. And while these small, private emotional debits compiled, the insane gale of the world-at-large kept churning out new debasements to our civic life. Unmoored from thoughtful, robust discourse, from the guiding lights of ethics and empathy, and even from the self-imposed railings of honesty and norms, our politics has degenerated into a grotesque caricature of public life.

Frankly, it’s wearying. After the winter – or perhaps after these forty-one years of sentience – I’m a little care-worn, a little buffeted.

“Most people,” Rilke writes, “have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult…it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult.”

If these last months have proven anything, it’s that I want to shy away from the difficult, take the handiest exit distraction provides. Rilke’s words feel like a chance to consider the ways in which I behave like “most people.” What unexamined conventions have I adopted? What habits of mind do I rely upon, not because they enrich my life, but precisely because they shield and divert me from the wonder and, let’s be frank, terror of being alive? It’s easier, so much easier, to duck one’s head and scroll Instagram than it is to keep one’s face to the wind of our deepest questions, our mortality, our hopes, our loneliness, our longings.

Solitude invites us to an interior expansiveness. I find that just inside solitude’s gate the way is populated with advertising jingles and grocery lists, political diatribes, frustration at my son for losing his soccer jersey, my sense of failure because I didn’t make it to the gym today, the comeback I should have used on that bully back in eighth grade. But that’s just the first mile. Once I’ve passed this by, who knows what vastness I’ll find.

“But listen to the voice of the wind/ and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence,” Rilke writes in his first Duino Elegy.  The wind is in the balsamroots now, nodding their heads, shaking their silver leaves. It’s in me, if I have ears to hear it. It’s in this busy, hard, beautiful, passing, poignant life. What I actually long for is to listen for that ceaseless message wrought from silence. Everything good tells me it’s worth the difficult journey.

Peace,

Lindsay

Consider: The Winds of Our Humor

/ eachholyhour / 3 Comments

Dear Friends,

They’ve gone. In a clatter of lunchboxes, a flash of new shoes, the quick zip of backpacks, the children have gone to school. The house is unnaturally quiet. The dog looks up at me, takes the situation in, then shambles to her pillow, turns three circles, and settles in with a sigh. “It’s just us,” I confirm her suspicions. She looks up once. Then rests her nose on her paws. All summer, my house has been abuzz with action. Neighborhood kids, moving in packs, descend like locusts at lunchtime. There’s balls bouncing and the hose going and scooter wheels click-clacking on the sidewalk. There’s teenage boys raiding my pantry. There’s a half-dozen water glasses on the counter that I sweep into the dishwasher only to find another half-dozen sprout in their place. There’s chalk on my driveway and an array of bikes tangled in the grass. At times, there’s sudden shouts, demands, and tears, oft-punctuated by the plaintive cry: “Mom!”

All this.  And then one day, there’s quiet. I can hear a bug tick against a window pane, the rhythmic click of the solar-powered Good Fortune cat that waves in a pool of sun on the kitchen sill. The refrigerator hums.

For most of this past year, I’ve been estranged from writing, and hence from some of the interior spaces I only reach through writing my way to them. When I’m intermittent with this practice of scratching at words, I find the paths quickly overgrow and I wake up – as it were – “in the middle of my life, in a darkwood, and the straightforward pathway is totally lost.”

I have a sense that all the tender sensibilities in me which are capable of responding to the play of the Spirit, have calcified and grown coarse from disuse.

Have you experienced these moments? The sense you’ve diminished, you’ve lost your way to some part of you that is, at once, expansive and finely-wrought. At times like these, exiled from the best parts of myself, my spirit feels crouched and limited.

My mind canvasses my environment for props: a quick check on news headlines, a brief dash through Instagram. But like all sham palliatives, the effect is illusory. In a moment, silence reasserts itself, like a bracing wind full in my face.

I realize I have only two choices: to continue the distraction-seeking behavior – a host of enticing possibilities immediately suggest themselves (podcasts, a run with the dog, even laundry – Wow, I must be desperate)  – or I can open a blank document, lean into the discomfort, and begin the humble task of applying myself to silence’s tutelage.

But when I’ve chosen silence, I’m immediately greeted, not by peace and a sense of fitness, but by the internal critic who questions everything from my sentence structure to my basic worthiness. This voice stridently opines that those fugitive brushes with the holy that writing has, at times, been my means of encountering, are gone. The track has gone cold. It will never be resurrected.

In a letter in October 1813, Jane Austen wrote, “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.” The process of spinning gold from the straw of our days is hard-won. I think of how many things in life I could substitute into Ms. Austen’s advice: I’m not in the humor for eating my vegetables, for sitting in quiet prayer, for caring for my crotchety neighbor, for lacing up my tennis shoes and going for a run. The remedy is the same: do it anyway.

The point is that the opportunity to know ourselves, to touch in with what is true and best in us, to be like trees planted by streams of water, as the Psalmist says, is a work of persistence, commitment, and sweat (whether that’s physical, mental, or spiritual). It requires we go into the unwelcome quiet. It invites us to develop a discipline, or several. And when the winds of our humor are against us, to lean in and meet them full in the face.

Peace,

Lindsay

Consider: Always we begin again

/ eachholyhour / 8 Comments

Dear Friends,

Remember us?  You haven’t heard from Each Holy Hour in awhile, but here we are, back again in your inbox. The reason for EHH’s prolonged silence rests with me. This past year, I said “yes” to too many things. In addition to our family’s full time business, parenting three kids, and writing, I took a position as a middle school teacher and, shortly after that – as if life were not full enough already – my husband and a business partner opened a gym. In their own right, each of these commitments has merit. As additions to a family life already running near capacity, the extra time, energy, and stress, these added were far more than anticipated. By February, my husband and I were both working with no margin, every waking moment accounted for with some obligation, each night dropping, spent, into scant sleep. The refrigerator kept running out of food. The dog rued her change of fortune with deep, exasperated sighs. Slag piles of laundry accumulated at the bottom of the clothes chute. More times than I care to remember, my husband and I ran out of patience with one another. 
IMG_4428
Though I knew I was running on empty, when my church asked me to speak on the topic of seeking God’s presence for a Lenten program, I agreed. I prepared my talk, clipped on the mic, and began confidently. Halfway into my presentation, I repeated the question upon which I’d been asked to reflect: What does it look like for me to intentionally seek deeper intimacy with God?Suddenly my eyes began to smart. I could feel my mouth pull out of shape. I choked out the next sentences in a voice that hardly sounded like my own.

“Seeking deeper intimacy with God looks like all the things I’m notdoing. It looks like being outside. It looks like a device turned off. It looks like writing my way into a deeper and more nuanced experience of my life. It looks like cultivating real relationships beyond my comfort zone. It looks like ennobling my life by keeping my mind full of the beautiful language, imagery, and ideas of our sacred stories. It looks like asking hard questions of my life and seeking to align myself with their answers, however challenging that may be. I know all these things. And yet, here I am telling you I’m notdoing them.”

There’s a peculiar malady I’m affected by, perhaps its symptoms are familiar to you, in which I resist admitting I’m in over my head. Though my hair may be visibly graying, though I’m slugging down coffee by the liter, though I’m touchy at the slightest suggestion that the milk is getting low and I should have thought to pick up another gallon, to acknowledge how thin I’m stretched is to admit personal deficiency. At the Lenten talk, this confession came out sideways, quick hot tears that spoke far louder than my carefully crafted speech.

Today is the first day of the school year being finished, and with it my job. In a steady June rain, I took the dog for a run. Eager to be out, she galloped down the trail, sniffing clumps of yarrow and rooting at the base of cottonwood stumps. The rain beat evenly on the mosses, the fallen logs, the heifers in the field. It dripped off ponderosa needles and wild roses. It worked its way through my clothes and shoes, soaking me thoroughly. The dog tore through a puddle in the trail, displacing the pollen collected on its top. Dashed to the puddle’s edge, the pollen encircled it like an aureole, a halo as sure as any that shimmers around a saint’s head.  It reminded me that rain or shine, the world is filled with holy things. I don’t have to prove my worth, or earn my way to this grace. It just is.

Recently, I came across a quote from Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield. “In the end these things matter: how greatly you loved, how gently you lived, how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” It turns out that, though I loved teaching, and though the opportunity to extend my time at the school presented itself, I had to let it go. At this season, it isn’t meant for me. I don’t know that I let it go gracefully – rather fitfully and with considerable consternation. But, if I’ve learned one thing this year, it’s that I can’t hustle my way into loving greatly and living gently. I can’t say “yes” to every opportunity, even good ones, without losing things I treasure along the way – like you and the community we’ve built at Each Holy Hour. So, here we are.  As the Benedictines say about any contemplative journey, “Always we begin again.” 

Peace,

Lindsay

P.S. As always, we love your comments and interaction!

Consider: Moondust, our Longing, and the Infinite

/ eachholyhour / 2 Comments

Dear Friends,

On Wednesday, as students straggled into school, hungover from Halloween candy and the revelries of parading late in their costumes, the STEM teacher and I aired the documentary, “The Last Man on the Moon.” This documentary chronicles the life of Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, the last of America’s lunar landing expeditions.

To say I have even casual interest in space science would be a generous stretch. While I’m awed when the occasional Hubble Telescope photo crosses my path, I usually glaze over when reading sentences like the one at the bottom of the previous paragraph. As a writer of realistic fiction, my imagination is decidedly terrestrial. I’m lit up by human stories and expeditions to that vastest of interiors: the human heart.  

So I was ready to pass a sleepy morning in the company of pacified 7th and 8th graders and if I gleaned some space science knowledge, so much the better.  What I got instead was a fascinating exploration of the paradoxes and emotional minefields which no rocket shot can shake from the human heart.  Perhaps it was the extremis of being an astronaut — literally out of one’s element, suspended above the world — that dialed up the volume on the constant human scuffle between loneliness and connection. “I felt that all of humanity was with me on that mission,” Cernan says of his first spaceflight with Gemini IX. And yet later, when looking back at his three days on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission, the Earth rising like a blue pearl in the distance, he spoke of incredible loneliness.  Accompanied by all humanity and yet, at once, all alone: Isn’t this a striking picture of our perennial condition?  

On the lunar surface, Cernan traced his daughter’s initials in moondust. This heartfelt act of bestowing what he cherished most to that distant surface struck me. It was as if marking her initials there made them timeless, delivering them to a place where moth and rust cannot destroy. And yet, his relationship with his daughter and wife were fraught; sabotaged by the intense singular focus of his career, marked by his absence. “You think going to the moon is hard, try staying home,” his wife reflected on watching the broadcast of her husband out there on the spearpoint of human technology. Eugene Cernan made it back, but ultimately his marriage didn’t survive. Some frontiers are too vast to cross. Some journeys end with loss.

IMG_6799

2017 Eclipse–when we were all lost in wonder, if only for an hour

I’ve been thinking about Gene Cernan and the moon a lot over these past few days. In what ways does loneliness and deep human connection nudge shoulders in my life? How much I want what I most love to be lifted above time, to be kept safe from the world’s corrosive effects. But even now, while I have breath and life, am I giving the earth-bound, time-bound things I love my full presence?

On August 25, 2012, Gene Cernan climbed the steps to the pulpit at Washington National Cathedral to eulogize his friend and fellow astronaut, Neil Armstrong.  “Neil, wherever you are up there, almost a half century later, you have now shown once again the pathway to the stars…You can now finally put out your hand and touch the face of God.”

I, for one, don’t know much about pathways to the stars. I’m the type who firmly stands with Robert Frost when he says, “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” But Cernan’s words over his friend’s casket resonate all the same. I hear in them a rich longing for the infinite resolution to all our finite journeys. No rocket can lift us there–yet daily, we are invited on this most daring expedition.
Peace,

Lindsay

P.S. You can watch the entirety of Cernan’s moving eulogy for Neil Armstrong here.

Consider: We are made to celebrate each other

/ eachholyhour / 4 Comments

Dear Friends,

girls with leaves in handAs a writer, I care passionately about words.  As my church’s artist-in-residence, I share prayers and mediations with congregants, choosing words with painstaking care, knowing that what comes out of my mouth has the power to comfort and deepen or distract and harm.  As a mother of three girls from elementary to high school, I am a vigilant moderator of words.  Just yesterday, I took my eleven-year old aside for the umpeenth time, locked my eyes with hers, and said, “You may not say hate anymore.”

In this cynical time when public insult is only one tweet away, I found it encouraging when my husband came home from a conference and told me that the facilitator had closed with a blessing.  The facilitator, who is from an Indian-Kenyan heritage where benedictions are an integral part of life, read a blessing that invited its listeners to move from self-protection to vulnerability and love for others.

In a country where our right to free speech is protected by law, I often feel as though words feel cheap, bandied about thoughtlessly.  But what we say flows from who we are, and that makes each word pregnant with meaning.  Words start wars, end relationships, rip through families.  As I endlessly tell my children, we are responsible for every word, however thoughtless, that leaves our lips.

But what about words chosen intentionally with love?  Why are we so often dismissive and cynical of gentleness?  In our preference for biting satire and one-liners, have we created a desert devoid of genuine kindness?  Have we as a culture forgotten how to bless one another?

“In the parched deserts of postmodernity a blessing can be like the discovery of a fresh well.  It would be lovely if we could rediscover our power to bless one another. . .It is ironic that so often we continue to live like paupers though our inheritance of spirit is so vast,” Celtic mystic and priest John O’Donohue writes in his book, To Bless the Space Between Us.

I have found nothing more powerful than words carefully crafted in love and imagination.  No matter what your spiritual background, this is a heritage we can all share, a common language of blessing.  You don’t have to be a writer or a poet or a priest.  Beginning to bless another person can be as simple as pausing in the midst of a hectic day to say to a friend or colleague, “You do good work;” “You are a delightful person, and may you find delight today;” “May you find courage in this hard situation.”  These are profoundly powerful to hear.  We are parched for authentic, attentive words.

So often I neglect to bless others because I am weary; I feel I deserve to receive and have nothing left to give.  But in the act of blessing others, we create streams of grace that flow over the giver and the receiver:  “The quiet eternal that dwells in our souls is silent and subtle; in the activity of blessing it emerges to embrace and nurture us,” John O’Donohue writes.  “Whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you.”

This week, though I am at turns blinded by cynicism and wearied by life, I hope to open my eyes to see whom I can bless.  Authentic, simple love: it is the center of who we are.  Let us not forget that we are made to find beauty in others, to name it, and celebrate it.

girls in leavesSo this week, may you be enfolded by transforming goodness, and may you have the courage to open your arms to others and to speak in wonder and love.

Peace,

Kim

P.S.  This week, I highly recommend:

—this interview between Krista Tippett and John O’Donohue (one of my all-time favorites on On Being).

—this reflection by Parker Palmer– “The Gift of Presence, the Perils of Advice” which includes this amazing quote from Mary Oliver:  “This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”

—this lovely blogpost I serendipitously stumbled upon by farmer and family physician Emily Polis Gibson, which reminds me that blessing others is also (and should often be) a silent gift, a benediction of attentive listening.  Check out the quotes to the right of the post–there’s a beautiful one by T.S. Eliot included.

P.S.S.  We are profoundly thankful for all of you.  As always, we are excited to expand our wonder by hearing your comments and recommended reading!  Please share either in a comment on our  blog or on Facebook, or contact us here.

Consider: Reclaiming Our Attention

/ eachholyhour / 1 Comment

Dear Friends,

Yesterday, my husband and I took a walk through a beautiful fall afternoon. Our dog nosed at animal trails and loped through a stand of golden aspens. The afternoon, in all respects, was gorgeous, the sort of full-color fall afternoon you know will soon be memory. My husband looked up. “Do you know what the weather is going to be tomorrow?”aspens

I stopped in the middle of the trail and automatically reached toward my phone. Some part of my mind halted. “Don’t do it!” I said to myself. I pulled an empty hand back and picked a spear of grass instead, twirling it between my fingers. “No idea,” I answered my husband, “we can look when we get back.”    

Sustained attention, we all know, is under assault. I recently listened to an interview about “the arms race for human attention” with former Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris. This interview was darkly illuminating about the persuasive psychology upon which internet content and smartphone applications are built. Far from neutral, the technology which frames our lives is engineered to maximize habit-formation and addiction. I feel moderately aware that my attention is being hijacked, and yet I still tune in to the ever-ready supply of constantly refreshed newsfeed, headlines, and emails.

We each have an inner garden to cultivate. Our hearts and minds, our brain space, our attention, are ours to tend. This work is our birthright. And everyday, I sell some portion of this birthright for meager return. Today I sold it for one trip to Facebook, nine or ten worthless checks on my email, and several swipes on national headlines.

I want my attention back. I want my inner garden to be rich with rare and exotic flowers cultivated over years of patience, effort, and considered attention. In this era where statistics show the average attention span has dropped below that of the common goldfish, I can’t assume that reclaiming my attention will come easily. Literally billions of dollars are arrayed against it.

Recently I came across this quote from Marcus Aurelius: “Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains… But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul…Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself.”

As I read this quote, something stirred inside. My modern mind feels abuzz with lists and worries, with reminders and to-dos. It couldn’t feel further from Aurelius’ trouble-free retreat. Yet it is within my power to retire into my own soul, to journey deep into that wilderness. Though billions of dollars clamor otherwise, each and every moment, the choice to make such a journey is mine.

Peace,

Lindsay

P.S.  What is your answer for leaving the constant buzz and “retiring into your soul?”  We really want to know!  Leave a comment here or (ironically) on EHH’s Facebook page, or send us a message.

Consider: This Good Work of Ours

/ eachholyhour / 8 Comments

Dear Friends,

Recent events have wound me tightly.  I’ve been worrying over my middle school daughter’s ineptitude with homework, fretting over a new lump in my breast, mourning the passing of our neighbor’s dog, and opening my newsfeed with a pit in my stomach.  On Monday morning, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, reflecting on nuclear war, undone English assignments and mammograms, my heart began to pound.

“I am battling the approach of a panic attack,” I realized.  I’m not alone.  In her article, We Can’t Survive in a State of Constant Agitation, Sharon Salzburg tells the story of Jeanine, who wakes in dread to the news on her phone. Fearful that she will miss anything, she lives her day agitatedly glued to a screen:

“She would not respect herself if she turned a blind eye to the painful truths of the world, but the world breaks her heart.  This habit does not do anything to help her change the things she is so concerned about.  In many ways, it substitutes for action.”

I found Salzburg’s article right after reading about the devastation in California.  Okay, I thought, time to shut my computer.  Time to act.  But how?

My vocation lends itself to contemplation more than action, which is often a source of much consternation for me.  Growing up in a family of do-gooders (in the best sense), I struggled with my identity.  I felt as though I was put on earth to find beauty, to listen to it, to write it.  Such work is so often unquantifiable (hundreds of pages scrapped, hours of quiet seeing and being that seem to help exactly no one).  And though my work takes me right into the middle of suffering, my actual output can feel ineffectual and insignificant.

But this work–writing and being–is what I have been given to do.  So this week, I took action.  I met with people and laughed, prayed, talked and listened.  I went for long walks in the woods.  I knelt down next to my dog to see the world from her eyes.  I stopped to wonder at the way the sun lit golden oak leaves.  I made an appointment for a mammogram.  I helped my daughter with her homework.  I said goodbye to my neighbor’s dog and then I picked a bouquet of flowers from my fading garden for their family.  I did laundry and made dinner and wrote.

And I tried to love it all, like so many people have before me.  I take strength in the odd, unquantifiably wonderful lives of people like Van Gogh.  He never knew that his work would amount to much but understood that living in this world is a complicated, messy thing that has less to do with productivity and more to do with the immeasurable.  “It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength,” he wrote to his brother Theo,  “And whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

At the beginning, and middle, and end of all things, this is my sacramental work, and your work too.  So if the world ends in a blinding flash while I am sitting next to my daughter at the kitchen table; if I am standing in a glade of young alders with my dog; if I am here, at my window, writing; I want to be loving fiercely all the while.  For I have found that living well in the mundanity of the day-to-day requires great courage and audacious love.

So wherever you are this week, whatever you are doing, may you have the strength to turn from fear to love.  May you choose to hope.  May you seek wisdom to do your work well.  And may you find joy in this good, infused world.

Peace,

Kim

P.S.  What is the good work you have been given?  We would love to hear from you.  Please leave a comment on our blog, Facebook, or send us a note .  If you’re on Instagram, use hashtag #thisgoodwork.  You can find our daily Instagram posts, with quotes from inspiring people and photos of daily wonder, at each_holy_hour.

P.P.S.  For further reading to help you in your journey this week, I recommend these articles:
We Can’t Survive in a State of Constant Agitation by Sharon Salzberg;
Vincent Van Gogh on Art and the Power of Love. . . by Maria Popova;
The Hollowness of Autumn Leaves Space for Light, by one of my favorites, Parker Palmer.
Oh, yes, and this one:  You’ll Never Be Famous, and That’s Okay by Emily Esfahani Smith