Most people no doubt missed the celebration on Sunday, January 21st. Not to worry. It was neither a religious or a patriotic holiday. It was one that went unnoticed for most except a couple of my Facebook friends who are ‘in the know’. What was special about this past winter Sunday you ask? It was National Squirrel Appreciation Day. So there. Who knew? Who names these days continues to be a mystery to me. But on the new calendar I opened for 2024 graced by the art of someone I much admire and have followed for some time, the date is clearly marked and honored. National Squirrel Appreciation Day was lifted up by David M. Bird as a part of his whimsical images of acorns turned into human-like figures doing all manner of precious things. If you have not seen his work, I commend it to you. https://www.davidmbird.com/gallery

So it is time for confession. Squirrels are often the bane of my existence. The ways in which they get the birdseed I place in the feeders is maddening. During tulip blooming time, the way they knock the blossom off the tulip without even eating it has, on occasion, caused me to run from the house chasing them back to their safe perch on a fence or tree limb looking back at me like the crazy person I must seem. So it was a good reminder that, at least according to this calendar, there is a day to appreciate these little beings with long, fluffy tails. 

And while I may not always appreciate them, I can say I always have a certain admiration for the ways they live in the world. Watching from the deck on a summer’s day as they scurry along the wires like acrobats fills me with awe for their balance and agility. Watching them propel their gray furry bodies from wire to limb to the metal pole of the bird feeder is quite impressive to say nothing of their speed in crossing a street safely.  Gazing up at the bare winter branches and seeing their nests, their homes, gives me pause on these bitter, windy, winter days. Is this appreciation? I hope it is. Maybe there is some absolution in that. 

Of course, there is also their playful nature which is something I wish I could emulate more often. The ways in which they run and jump and chase one another brings laughter to my heart and I hope some kind of squirrel joy to them. That playful quality is echoed in a poem by the equally playful poet Bill Collins in a poem titled Palermo:

It was foolish of us to leave our room.
The empty plaza was shimmering.
The clock looked ready to melt.
The heat was a mallet striking a ball
and sending it bouncing into the nettles of summer.
Even the bees had knocked off for the day.
The only thing moving besides us
(and we had since stopped under an awning)
was a squirrel who was darting this way and that

as if he were having second thoughts
about crossing the street,
his head and tail twitching with indecision.

You were looking in a shop window
but I was watching the squirrel
who now rose up on his hind legs,

and after pausing to look in all directions,
began to sing in a beautiful voice
a melancholy aria about life and death,

his forepaws clutched against his chest,
his face full of longing and hope,
as the sun beat down
on the roofs and awnings of the city,

and the earth continued to turn
and hold in position the moon
which would appear later that night

as we sat in a cafe
and I stood up on the table
with the encouragement of the owner

and sang for you and the others
the song the squirrel had taught me how to sing.

While one could say that National Squirrel Appreciation Day has passed for this year, I suppose there is nothing to keep any of us from appreciating them any day we think of it. Appreciate and salute their agile abilities…their jumping…their leaping…their scurrying…their courage…their resilience…their  playfulness…their song.

Slowly the remnants of what held the Christmas holidays is being dismantled. My Mother took our Christmas tree down on the day after Christmas. No Boxing Day or Twelve Days of Christmas for her. Time to begin a new year and get the living room back to normal. I tend to linger over the process. It is a slow practice of putting things back into boxes and then into the attic. First the small Santas and trees that line the mantle and tabletops. Then the various pictures with Christmas and winter themes that have been hung on the wall for these December days, to be replaced by others that hang there at other times of the year.

But the Christmas tree is the last. I can’t seem to let go of the light that dances from its branches during these dark days. In the last years I have appropriately, I think, named the emotion that accompanies this necessary act of removing the tree: Grief. There is a certain amount of grief that rests on the removal of the ornaments, of the tree. Just as there was the bittersweet feeling of each colorful bauble out of storage, remembering where they came from, when they were purchased or received, allowing the memory of it all to make its home on the branches of this tree that literally gave its life for our enjoyment. When the ornaments are removed and placed again in the red and green box, those same memories are tucked away for another year. Much will happen between this season and its arrival again in twelves months. The way in which our hands reach for them again will have another year of living etched upon them. So there is the grief of letting go of what has been and the uncertainty of what experiences will shape their removal when the time comes again. In so many ways this act of decorating a tree carries with it more than the experience of festivity. It can be, if we are awake, a yearly marker of our life. 

Yesterday as I removed the ornaments from our tree, I lingered a bit over a few. There are ones with names printed on them. Gifts from friends and family members. We continue to hang the ones with my husband’s name on them even though he left us four years ago. So those carry special meaning. There is one given to me by a five year old, a small guitar painted in Christmas green and red, her name printed by her Mother who also left us this year. This five year old has become a sweet friend/sister/daughter over the years and I always send a quick photo to her of the ornament to remind her of how long our lives have been entwined. And there is the oldest on the tree. A gift from my grandmother’s friend it catches the heat and shine of the lights sending its wheel whirling. It was a fascination for me as a child and became the same for my sons. 

Yes. There is much that happens in the decorating of a Christmas tree. Beginnings and endings. Memories both beautiful and raw. I was pleased to read this poem by Jane Kenyon called “Taking Down the Christmas Tree”:

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it’s dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother’s childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant.

A bit of the scent from the tree lingers… mostly in the needles that seem to appear no matter how much I vacuum. In the endings of last year and the beginnings of this one, there is the darkness and the promise of light that will replace that which shone from the tree. May they, may we, live on in extravagance. 

Over the last two weeks, I have been witness to flying…people flying. I am not talking of the many airplanes in the sky that I observe over my house which sits quite near the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. I am talking of humans lifting off the ground and flying…like birds. The freedom of it is still thrumming in my spirit.

The first was at the performance of Peter Pan at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts. This reworking of the story that first inched its way into my life as a small child was pure magic. Though I knew the actors were not really flying, I could not see the wires which lifted and catapulted them into the air. The exuberance and delight on their faces and those in audience lifted me above the ordinary of a late December evening. As Peter urged us to clap our hands and say “I believe.” to bring Tinkerbell back from the brink, I knew I was also saying I believe in the power of flight.

Then in yet another tale meant for children but with messages for adults to ponder, the movie Wonka also had characters taking flight. Some of them were exercising their power of imagination and fancy while others were sent up in the air as a kind of time out for bad behavior. Sitting in the darkened theater I again felt that sense of freedom the idea of flying brought to me.

The truth is I have been captured by the idea of flying more than once in my life. When I was just a young child, perhaps three or four years old, I was in the upstairs of my grandparents house with them and my parents. They were moving something up into the second story of the house and had the window open to allow its entry. While they were busy talking I walked to that window and saw my opportunity. I stepped up and was just about to launch myself off the ledge when my Dad grabbed megrim behind and pulled me back. Since the night before we had watched Mary Martin flying as Peter Pan on the yearly broadcast of the movie, I believed I could fly and I was going to give it my best shot. Clearly imagination and reality collided.

For many years I had a recurring dream in which I would be in a situation in which tension was high and I wanted to escape. The situations differed but the feeling was the same: Get Out of Here! In the dream I would begin running and then I would use my arms in a swimming motion and soon…very soon I was lifted above the ground and was hovering over whatever was causing me such turmoil. I had escaped because I could fly.

It is a new year and though I am fairly certain the ability to fly is not in the cards for 2024, I was delighted to see this excerpt from a Mary Oliver poem: 

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.” 

I am not much for resolutions in the new year but this lovely, playful poem seems not too bad to shape an intention for the year. Many people are remarking that it could be a tough year given all that is happening in the world and the political climate in which we find ourselves. Perhaps imagined flying could be a gift. So…Noble. Light. Frolicsome. Beauty. No fear. 

As though I, as though we, had wings.

This is a core sample
from the floor of the Sea of Mending,
a cylinder packed with shells
that over many years
sank through fathoms of shirts –
pearl buttons, blue buttons –
and settled together
beneath waves of perseverance,
an ocean upon which
generations of women set forth,
under the sails of gingham curtains,
and, seated side by side
on decks sometimes salted by tears,
made small but important repairs.
~Ted Koser

Over the last couple of weeks I have been in two different conversations about zippers. Broken ones. Those out for repair. Those we had put into garments and torn out seeming to wreck the fabric and even the sewing machine. I am not a sewing historian but would imagine that before zippers were closures there were buttons. I have seen such things in museum displays of ancient finds.

This poem by Ted Koser is so evocative about this small, simple utilitarian item. Reading and rereading it the words conjured such a deep sense of melancholy and also hope. I was reminded of my grandmother’s button box which I inherited. It was a favorite plaything when I was a child. I would pour out the buttons and look at all the different tiny, round spheres…plain white, blue or black, sunshine yellow, rhinestoned gold, a white sailboat on blue background. These miniature jewel-like objects captured my imagination as I thought about how my Gram came to possess them and what they had adorned. 

Gram’s button box is only a small sample from the Sea of Mending the poet speaks of. We are living in times that are in deep, if not desperate need of a Sea of Mending. As the images of the crisis in the Middle East and in Ukraine and on our own southern border flood our eyes, the kind of mending that is needed is so much greater than buttons could accomplish. And while those images are mostly of men whose faces rise in anger and violence, there are also often in the background the women who care for the children and try to create home. They are “settled together beneath waves of perseverance, generations of women, seated side by side, salted by tears, making small but important repairs, participating in the Sea of Mending.” It seems to be as it is and always has been.

Buttons are small in the grand scheme of the world. Yet they represent our desire to repair, to protect, to adorn, even to remember. Some are passed down from mother to daughter to grandchild, from one generation to the next. Zippers may have their place but a well placed button can tell a story.

This summer I was working on a project with Gorilla Glue. I thought I was being careful and for the most part I was. But later in the day I looked down at the jeans I had been wearing to notice a round spot where the glue had made its way, creating a stain. I tried all the tricks for removing it to no avail. I looked at its little round spot and was resigned to making these jeans my ‘gardening’ pants. 

Then I thought of the button box. I retrieved it from the closet and found the perfect fit to cover that glue spot. The jeans took on that look of much more expensive, decorated denim with this single, white, lacy button covering my sticky mistake. I can now still wear them in public with my held held high…and be reminded of my Gram and her button box.

It was a tiny drop in the greater Sea of Mending.

People collect things. This can happen with intention or sheer accumulation. My mother collected tea cups and had them displayed all around her house. It always made for an easy Christmas or birthday gift. Her friend collected thimbles which I always carried back from a trip to add to her the display case she had needed to purchase to house these tiny treasures. I admit to collecting stones and shells…inexpensive reminders of places that have etched themselves on my heart. At one point I had started collecting small pitchers and have still purchased one or two even after I decided that I was heading down the road of needing to buy a piece of furniture to display them and wanted to nip that prospect in the bud.

Last week I was searching for some materials I need for an upcoming retreat I have agreed to help lead. That’s when I realized that I, too, have a collection. I collect poems. In files. Between the pages of books. Inside my calendar and those of years past. In small stacks that can be found inside a desk drawer. Tiny pieces of paper with the poet’s words stashed into places where I will find them again. Just when I need them. And this says nothing about the actual books of poetry that line my bookshelves and sit on available table tops. Poems that have been read or written for a particular event or worship service or within a facebook post or in a magazine. I have held onto them with a collector’s mind and heart…and grip.

Looking through one file marked simply, “Poems”, I became lost in the wash of words. I could no longer remember from where the particular poems had come. I only know that I had decided that I simply could not live without these words…and those…and especially these very specific ones. Tucked among them all was this poem by Catherine Barnett:

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord 
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle, 
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, 
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. 
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. 
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect 
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, 
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

I am not sure how this poem came to me or what was going through my mind…or my life…that caused me to add these words to my collection. It could have been the word ‘debacle’. If nothing else it is one of those words that just feels good in your mouth to say regardless of its meaning. It could have been because its title, “Epistemology” took me back to my seminary days when, like the word suggests, I was in the pursuit of all kinds of knowledge. 

These days dedicated to living my retirement with some manner of intention, I find I have more questions that answers and am more fascinated by words than ever before. This is a strange surprise of age. Yet I find I love the questions and the words that connect and the learning that results. (Life’s debacle…things are unleashed.) 

But if I allow myself to unravel the reason for the poem’s presence in my collection file, I am sure it had to do mostly with the trees and their communication and the notion of their loving. The ways in which they send sweetness to the root of suffering like a mother bakes cookies or adds sugar to milk to soothe the illness of her children. And the ways in which they stubbornly grow through obstacles and will not be deterred by wire or stone in an effort to connect and speak that love into the world. 

“Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.” I am grateful to the poet for affirming my conversations with trees, birch or otherwise. My heart is particularly full these days with love for the trees that are showing such devotion to beauty and letting go and waking us all up. Over the weekend I was witness to humans standing, simply standing, in awe at the color and the majesty of what autumn speaks through these grounded oracles. 

My big little mouth wanted to shout praise and joy at being alive and connected to these great teachers. Me, a birch among birches, a black walnut among others, a maples among them all.

“I’m so glad to live in a world where there are Octobers.”
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Ann of Green Gables.

October. Last week it dawned on me that October is kind of the Wednesday of the seasons. Even though it is the tenth month, it feels like the middle of the week…hump day. The glow of summer is moving into memory. Much like a weekend that has not yet been fully planned, the fullness of winter lives only in the imagination. For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere and in the midwest, October is the month that can feel like we are suspended. Some days are warm enough for short sleeves. Others require gloves and sometimes a hat. And of course there are those who live in the before and the not-yet, wearing shorts and a warm, fleece jacket. 

All seasons, all months, bring a definitive kind of light. October brings its own special golden glow that bathes trees full of surprising color which spills onto our floors inviting us to think about embracing a feline nature. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to crawl into the sunlight moving slowly, ever so slowly, through the window and across the floor? That action would also help stifle the message of wonderment about how dirty the windows have become and the urging to wash them before the snow flies. 

For those of us who rise early, there is also the darkness that has crept into the morning hours. No longer is there the greeting of pink-tinged morning light and the sound of birds trumpeting a wake up call. With windows closed and darkness lingering longer and longer, we are reminded that a shift is happening and we are wise to stay awake to its invitation. As the author A. A. Milne writes: “Yet, I can face the winter with calm. I suppose I had forgotten what it was really like. I had been thinking of the winter as a horrid wet, dreary time fit only for professional football. Now I can see other things—crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires. Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well. The end of the summer is not the end of the world. Here’s to October…”

Yes. Here’s to October. There are places in our world where it seems like ‘the end of the world’. Their world as they know it. In these days bathed in changing light and leaves that show themselves as the artist of limb and trunk, we can hold those places and those people in our hearts and, if we are praying people, our prayers. And we can toast October with the hope that it sends us gently into a winter that might offer a calm. For all the people. For all the places.

Three generations back
my family had only

to light a candle
and the world parted.

Today, Friday afternoon,
I disconnect clocks and phones.

When night fills my house
with passages,

I begin saving
my life.
~Marcia Falk

Last Sunday I began my morning as I usually do. After reading the paper, I sat down to watch CBS Sunday morning. I have come to think of this as my pre-church tailgating…coffee made, breakfast on a tray, settled into my comfy chair, I fill the 90 minutes before heading out for worship with this show filled with mostly feel good, inspiring stories. People doing good things for other people. Artists making art. Musicians making music. Kind words and some beautiful, colorful images of mandalas that offer an ‘amen’ at the end of every story. 

At some point of the show, my refreshments consumed, I picked up the needlework I had been working on the night before and began stitching. “You’ll have to pick those stitches out with your nose on Judgment Day.”, my Mother’s voice echoed in my head. This was something she would say if I began to sew on a Sunday. Sundays were not for sewing, or working in the yard, or going to the movies, or any other task that could be done on the other six days of the week. It was a message that came through loud and clear and while said with a certain tongue-in-cheek tone, it was not to be argued with.

That much-loved voice in my head, the voice that I don’t have the privilege to hear in real time anymore has stayed with me all week. I am sure my Mom did not literally believe this. And certainly, I don’t think the Creator of the Universe is much concerned with whether or not I move a needle through fabric on Sunday or any other day. But the intention behind her reprimand carries truth and wisdom: The importance of setting aside time for sabbath, for rest, renewal and honoring the Sacred keeps us in a balance that can move the world along in a gentler, more thoughtful way. In the pace of the world, when not only days but light and darkness gets blurred into one long opportunity for working harder and longer hours, the practice of sabbath…stopping, slowing down… calls to us from nearly all faith traditions and from a simple understanding of how to remain healthy. Even in retirement, I find myself packing days fuller than need be and to what end?

This all led me back to a gem of a book I have returned to over and over. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Busy Lives by Wayne Muller. It is a classic and yet, as most classics do, it finds ways to offer new insights given the passage of time and all that has happened in life since it was last perused. I thumbed through looking at the places I had underlined(a character flaw I refuse to give up) and wondered what I had been living, thinking when those words grazed my mind. As I flipped through I came upon the chapter that discussed the lamentation of many as to the decline of morality and values. Muller argues that this all needs to be seen as both individual and communal. It is in our valuation of time and how we live it that the answer can be found: “All these ‘lost’ values are human qualities that require time. Honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion-these can only be nourished in the soil of time and attention, and need experience and practice to come to harvest.” 

I like to believe that my Mother’s attention to setting aside the kind of time we did on Sundays was meant to sow the seeds of these ways of walking in the world…honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion. And certainly as we look around our country and our world, these all seem to be on rocky ground, don’t they? I wonder what might happen if we gave more of any day to nurturing the soil of those seeds. What kind of harvest might we reap?

My Mother was full of all kinds of sayings that she sprinkled through the conversation of the day. Some were funny and have become the kinds of quips grandkids remember and we all cherish. Others were meant to shape my brothers and me and remind us of the stock from which we sprang. An all time favorite when one of us was upset or anxious about something we had little control over was “A hundred years from now you’ll never know the difference.” 

We may not, Mom. But if we can slow down and create time to nourish the best within us, we just might save not only ourselves but pave a path of peace and goodness for the generations to come.

The fog comes on
little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor
and city on
silent haunches 
and then moves on.
~Robert Frost

There is something about fog. I am a lover of this meteorological phenomenon. Perhaps it is the Celtic blood running deep within that is drawn to those mornings when there is a veil that seems to hang over the arrival of the day much like a good Scottish moor. Perhaps it is my dramatic nature that finds the romance in the shadows the mist creates. Whatever it is, I always find a foggy, visually complicated start to the day touches something deep in me.

A few weeks ago now, I drove early on a Saturday to the St. Paul Farmer’s Market, a weekly ritual if I can make it happen. At the top of the High Bridge as it crosses the Mississippi River I encountered the gift of fog moving lazily over the road in front of me, drawing me toward a horizon I could not see. The road simply seemed to float into a Brigadoon-like land I was being called toward. It was so beautiful, so mesmerizing! Driving along the river road the familiar houses and buildings appeared and then disappeared as the wind moved the misty presence this way and that, taking new forms as it shifted. I pulled over to get a better view of…things I couldn’t really see but knew were there. There was a magic in it all on what good have been a regular, ordinary Saturday morning.

Every time I experience fog I think of how it is both a real weather-related, scientifically understandable fact of nature and yet is also metaphor. A metaphor that is a kind of teaching tool for all humans. How many times has the fog of a life experience cautioned us to slow down, be present to what is right in front of us? How many times have we walked in a kind of fog not knowing what lies at the end of the road, beyond that bend? These foggy times can be brought on by any number of things…anxiety, grief, self-centeredness, distraction, to name a few. It is then that the shadows move in to urge us to slow down, listen, breathe deeply, trust in the good possibility of the next step. It is then that we can squint into the shadows to bring something forth that had perhaps not even been imagined, something just outside our reach.

As Robert Frost’s classic poem teaches, fog always moves on. Always. It is short-lived. It can come just as quietly as little cat feet and then travel on, often, with a similar kind of silence. The foggy life times, hopefully, also move with the same gentleness, lifting to bring a fuller picture of the road, the path, the next. 

In the meantime, the shifting shadows can provide a magical backdrop to not only the present but what lies just beyond. Beyond this moment. Beyond this day. Something our eyes can only see once the fog lifts and moves on to that mysterious place from whence it came. 

Until the next time. Until the next time.

Fall has arrived. Though we have experienced some of the hottest days this summer, there is now a scent of chillier air that will eventually lead us into the inevitable winter. No matter our age, September can bring with it that anticipation of learning. It seems the rhythm of the school year is etched deep in our senses. I always feel something like hope in these weeks when the shift to busses driving by and children standing in wait appear. Something is triggered in me that has me thinking about new opportunities, new lessons to learn. There is always the desire to buy at least one notebook…just in case.

As I have been thinking about this shifting time, what really has captured my imagination is really the learning I have experienced over this summer. It all began with that crazy, amazing sunflower that planted itself outside my kitchen window. I wrote earlier about this seven foot beauty that just kept sprouting new limbs and then shooting out yellow blossom after yellow blossom.  In fact, it is still at it!

The first learning was to pay attention to all the things that happen in life in which I had no part in their creation. A very big, important lesson. Yet over the last weeks this plant has offered up even more wisdom. Not long after the golden flowers bloomed, bees…a variety of bees… started arriving to drink of the nectar which I imagine to be sweet. I don’t know this to be the case but it is how I imagine it. Then in the last three weeks tiny birds have perched on the shoots and tips of the flowers eating the seed of the sunflowers. I can stand at my kitchen sink and stare with awe at the beauty of goldfinches and sparrows and wrens nibbling away. They are so close I can see their little eyes and the movement of their beaks. Each time I find myself holding my breath in part so I don’t frighten them away but also because their presence seems to warrant a breath-holding moment. 

And at different times, there will be several kinds of bees, these beautiful, fragile birds… and then a monarch butterfly will show up. All these beings co-existing together on the same plant, sharing in the gift the sunflower offers. Right there for me to observe. And I think of how we are all of us…insects, winged ones, this two-legged one…here all together, sharing this moment in time, on this little plot of land, swirling around the galaxy on this big, beautiful ball of Earth. It is a lesson in the countless ways we are connected to so many living things. It has helped me to be awake and aware of all those whose lives are a part of my own living. And it has caused a kind of confounded, humble, gratitude to grow in me.

The poet Ross Gay wrote a book of poetry called simply The Book of Delights in which he offers many images of these kinds of wake up calls that can lead to a gentler living. He has written this poem which he calls Wedding Poem:

Friends, I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch kissing
a sunflower
again and again
dangling upside down
by its tiny claws
steadying itself by snapping open
like an old-time fan
its wings
again and again,
until, swooning, it tumbled off
and swooped back to the very same perch,
where the sunflower curled its giant
swirling seeds
around the bird and leaned back
to admire the soft wind
nudging the bird’s plumage,
and friend I could see
the points on the flower’s stately crown
soften and curl inward
as it almost indiscernibly lifted
the food of its body
to the bird’s nuzzling mouth
whose fervor 
I could hear from
oh 20 or 30 feet away
and see from the tiny hulls
that sailed from their 
good racket,
which good racket, I have to say
was making me blush,
and rock up on my tippy-toes,
and just barely purse my lips
with what I realize now
was being, simply, glad,
which such love,
is we let it,
makes us feel.

Though the poet says it much better than I ever could, this is some of what I have learned this summer. And now I am ready for what this ‘school year’ will bring and what new lessons await. Thank you, Summer Sunflower. You have been an amazing teacher.

Last week on the CBS Sunday Morning show, there was a story that has traveled with me all week. It was a story about a man in his eighties who is the gravedigger for a small town cemetery. It might sound like a downer yet it was anything but. Though he could have handed this job on to someone else, he continues to do this work because he wants it done right, even digging the grave for his own wife. He also does other handyman tasks for people well into the years when most people are settled into retirement. Those interviewed talked of his kindness, his helpfulness, the way the work he does for people often does not come with a bill… though he says he will send one when asked. One of those who had received such generosity said about him that “He is someone who knows that he has enough.”

I have thought about that ‘enough’ many times over the last week. Enough. It seems an elusive thing at times. Living in a country, a world, that has difficulty recognizing what is ‘enough’ it is easy to be lured by the next shiny thing, the new, must-have product, the advertisements that convince us of a need we did not know we had. These messages permeate our screens, our written pages, and eventually our minds. It is an insidious landscape to traverse and it is one that is planted in us from a very early age.

Thinking about this man whose work is to prepare the earth for the eternal reception of loved ones, I wondered at this message of ‘enough’. What is enough for me? What is enough for you? Did I raise children who know how to recognize the enough in their lives? Do I live a life that reminds me that I do, indeed, have enough?

Of course, enough is a relative experience. I write this from the place of privilege. I have enough food, a safe place to live, friends and family who support and care, resources that provide for all my basic needs. There are certainly countless people around the world and in my scope of living who cannot say the same. Their enough is different than mine and can provide a mirror for assessing my own life and how I choose to live it.  

Of course, there are some things I can never have enough of…beauty in all its forms…the sound of birdsong…the sight, sound and presence of my children…the color green…music, music, music…the sparkle of sunlight on water…books and the stories that live in them. For these things, I am a hoarder and proud of it. Yet all these things add nothing to the financial economy. Only my soul economy.

These days I am trying to be awake and aware of all that creates my own ‘enough.’ Before I am seduced into the product that calls out to me from the store aisles or that pops up on my newsfeed, I ask myself about my true need. And that true need is usually pretty simple. It may be best expressed in this poem by David Whyte that I have come back to again and again:

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

What is your ‘enough’? What guides your thinking and acting in discovering this? It seems to me it is a lifelong quest and one that takes courage and wisdom. But I believe, like the grave digging octogenarian, it is, in the end, one that leads to a life of gratitude and joy. A life spent opening itself again and again. Every day. Every moment.