A few days ago I spent time listening to an interview Krista Tippett did with John O’Donohue, the poet, philosopher and wise one, in what must have been the year before he suddenly died. It was wonderful to again hear his lilting Irish brogue as he read the poetry that never ceases to leave me speechless. It was also so healing to hear his deep, often bawdy, laugh. This interview was an uncut version of what had appeared on her radio show, ‘On Being’. The recording itself was nearly 90 minutes of banter, rich conversation, poetry and wisdom woven together with laughter.
At one point of the interview Tippett had posed a question that dealt with balance and psychological health in our culture. I don’t remember the exact nature of the question. But in traditional Irish style, O’Donohue answered with a lovely story. He told of a woman who came to him for counsel. She felt out of balance, ungrounded, out-of-sorts, even lost. She told him of her feelings and state of being. She also told him she did not want to go to a therapist. He recounted his listening, being present to her pain and longings, and his respect for what she did and did not want to do to overcome this condition.
Then he gave her a prescription that could not be filled at a local pharmacy. “Here’s what I want you to do. Every morning I want you to go someplace where you can watch the sun rise. Stay there and be present to the coming of the day. At night, go to some place where you can watch the sun set. Stay there and notice the day’s ending. Do this for one month and then come back and talk to me.” While he never tells completely what happened to this woman in her observing, he does say that what ailed her had passed and that, at the end of the month, she felt healed.
Now I am not so naive as to think this prescription would help all those who feel disconnected from their world, disconnected from their souls. But hearing this did reaffirm for me the need, I believe,all humans have to find connection with the Earth and the movements of this vast Universe of which we are a minute part. The experience of the eternal movements over which we have no part, over which we have no hand in their being, is a humbling and freeing realization. Paying attention to the sun rising and setting, being witness to the new, spring leaves as they unfold from the bud, keeping watch over the tulip and daffodil bulbs pushing their way out of the soil, puts our lives and our living in perspective and has the power to heal us.
Yesterday I spent some time watching the Mississippi River flow. It was holy work. I watched the still freezing waters move downstream toward the Gulf picking up little bits of debris and then casting them off as unacceptable, throwing plastic bottles and sticks up on the rocks for humans to pick up as they clean up the river rocks and beaches. Other heavier and more weighty objects got carried along for the ride. Who knows if they will make it all the way till the river pours itself into the sea? Barges filled with sand(from where?) were being pushed upstream by a tiny tugboat. I wondered at the life of those whose life’s work is to travel the river. What must they see in the course of a season? What wisdom do they carry within? Ducks floated along looking peaceful and content to be held in the current. A few people held fishing poles with lines extended into the river. I somehow thought they,like me, were really only there to allow the river’s wisdom to wash over them with little care as to whether they caught anything or not.
No one had given me a prescription to go to the river. I simply followed an inward call to ground myself in the wisdom of what I have no power to generate. This river immortalized in story and song is a gift of glacier and God. I was reminded of the poem by Langston Hughes that begins: ” I’ve known rivers. I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
Yesterday, watching the muddy waters of the Mississippi, I prayed my soul would indeed grow as deep.
