Idle and Blessed

Enrique Martinez Celaya, world-renowned painter and physicist, decided to burn all his paintings in the late 80's. It was a significant pivot point in his career, post-apprenticeship and pre-success. He said he needed to build painting from the ground up.  So he destroyed all his paintings, and began to paint differently.  " I eliminated from my painting anything that anybody has ever said that I was good at. So if I was good at drawing, I took it out. If I was told I had facility with color, I took it out. And then I said, 'Well, if I give up all these things, what is painting, for me?'" Most of us spend our lives chasing success so desperately that we never give ourselves the freedom to explore the meaning of our lives without it. Or rather, the meaning of success without the ease of using our patterns and strengths. Maybe success is not phoning it in, staying in our lane, but honing our craft for the sake of the process itself. Maybe rejec...

My backyard is an oasis. Every morning I sit in my office and look out on (what seems to me like) a great expanse of lush greenness, teeming with life. The trees soar above, tiers of small-to-large bushes line the perimeter, and the middle is a gentle slope of grass. Birds never stop singing, and the sun or rain quietly finds its way through pockets of tree leaves down to the grassy floor. There is a perfect mix of steadiness and movement - the old still trees with their ever-flitting leaves embodying both together. And the creatures. The red cardinals and tiny finches, the birds that fight with squirrels, the birds that nest in the birdhouse. The chipmunks, the leaf cutter bees, and my favorite, the bunny who prefers early evening and rainy days. There is a constant flurry of movement in the yard, but you might only notice if you sit still enough to watch the window for a while. When you do, you will notice another constant sound: the highway, with cars like ocean waves that nev...

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but still nothing is as shining as it should be for you. Under the sink, for example, is an uproar of mice -- it is the season of their many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves and through the walls the squirrels have gnawed their ragged entrances -- but it is the season when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow; what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox, the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, know that really I am speaking to you whenever I say, as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in. - Mary Oliver

The Sycamore by Wendell Berry In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself. Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it, hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it. There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it that is its death, though its living brims whitely at the lip of the darkness and flows outward. Over all its scars has come the seamless white of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection  in the warp and bending of its long growth. It has gathered all accidents into its purpose. It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate. It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable. In all the country there is no other like it. I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling the same as itself, and grea...

Lent. Fasting. Remembrance of hard times. Acknowledgement of weakness. A sitting with pain.  Attentiveness to mortality, echoing: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Lent reminds us even God was tested, starving in the desert, like our father Moses and his fearful people. And so we expect this dark season of testing, in our yearly calendar but also in our lives. We expect and acknowledge the darkness. Jesus’ excruciating isolation in the desert, like the Israelites’ before him, had the paradoxical effect of fortifying his spirit against the things that would destroy it. If we pay attention, we may learn that times of testing – fasting – darkness – isolation –  strengthen our spirits for the journey ahead. The paradox of fasting. The paradox of Lent. A paradox of our faith. During Lent, we do not temporarily abstain from evil, but renew our commitment to wholly reject it. We do not put aside...

Debt. Forgotten debt. This is the way Eula Biss describes the state of whiteness in America in her 2015 article for the New York Times. “When he was 4, my son brought home a library book about the slaves who built the White House. I didn’t tell him that slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined, or that slaves were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, ‘‘the down payment’’ on this country’s independence, or that freed slaves became, after the Civil War, ‘‘this country’s second mortgage.’’ Nonetheless, my overview of slavery and Jim Crow left my son worried about what it meant to be white, what legacy he had inherited. ‘‘I don’t want to be on this team,’’ he said, with his head in his hands. ‘‘You might be stuck on this team,’’ I told him, ‘‘but you don’t have to play by its rules.’’ Even as I said this, I knew that he would be encouraged, at every juncture in his life, to believe wholeheartedly in the power of his own hard work an...

President Donald J. Trump Inauguration Day, 2017, excerpts : “Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now… For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation's borders while ref...